New federal wetlands rules

Now emphasize wetlands banking as the preferred form of mitigation. In Ohio, which is where I'm reading the news nowadays, this is causing heartache in environmental peeps because that state has focused on increasing the quality of replacement wetlands and on making them close to the lost wetlands. As a marker of the low quality of wetland replacement work, Ohio requires 3 acres of new wetlands to mitigate the loss of 1 acre of authentic wetlands. More here from the Beacon Journal

Since 1995, the Ohio EPA has been analyzing man-made, or replacement, wetlands.

[Ohio EPA ecologist John] Mack's team is surveying 25 of an estimated 415 man-made wetlands across Ohio. Most of the randomly chosen sites are in Northeast Ohio.

Perhaps 25 percent of the sites are good, Mack said, but the majority will earn a poor-to-fair grade.

''We can build quality wetlands, but that's something we don't always do,'' Mack said. '' . . . Quite frankly, we're just not getting the quality back that we're losing.''

...

What Mack is finding in his assessment of man-made wetlands mirrors the findings in a 2006 Ohio EPA evaluation of 1,000 acres of replacement wetlands: 25 percent were simply shallow ponds without vegetation. In the 2006 report, only 18 percent of the wetland acreage was of good quality.

Mack said too many of the man-made wetlands have ''too much water . . . for far too long.''

In a natural wetland, he said, water typically rises and falls, and that results in the growth of different plants.