Question
what can be done to help repair the wetlands that were damaged in the gulf coast after Katrina and Rita?
Thanks (this is a test question for new experts who signed up in March or April, but is a real question from the AskNSDL administrator)
Answer
That is an interesting question, but the answer probably isn't what you expect. The short answer is leave them alone, but the long answer has to do with what creates a wetland.
Wetlands are plant and animal communities that are pules stable. This means that what makes a wetland is the changes that occur constantly in the hydrology (water) of the area. Wetlands need constant disruption from water to maintain their species diversity. What this means is that disruption, such as in the case of Katrina and Rita, increases the diversity that wetlands depend on.
To explain my point a bit better, lets look at an example shoreline. Imagine a shore of a lake that always stays the same water level; plant life would be aquatic in the water, and trees would probably grow right up to the water line. This is not a wetland. Wetlands occur in the spaces between deep water and land rises, in other words, they are edge. Now, if we changed that lake to a river that floods yearly, the edge bank wouldn't have trees, it would have plants that could withstand water saturation (like wetland plants do) up until the point of the highest flood. If the area continued to have this pulse of water flooding, it would remain as a stable wetland; hence the term pulse stable.
So, back to your question. The wetlands, most likely, have been expanded and aided by the damage and flooding of the recent storms. Chances are good that the places that were wetlands that got filled in for housing probably have started to transform themselves back to wetlands again, because of their low lying nature. Humans tend to fill, or drain wetlands (with a permit from the US Army Corps of Engineers), and if we want to repair wetlands, the best thing to do is to leave them to nature.
It is possible to create new wetlands by scraping a layer of soil off, filling it with a impermiable (water can't go through it) layer of somthing like clay, and maybe even put local plants in the space as it collects with water.
Wetlands, pulse stable, katrina, rita
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