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Conservation Issues

Primary Question (chapter 20): What are the history, status, and likely future of forested wetlands in the South?

Related Question (chapter 23): What are the history, status, and likely future of aquatic habitats and species in the South?

Roughly half of the South’s forested wetlands were lost between colonial times (1780) and the 1990s, primarily through clearing for agriculture. In the last decade, attention has begun to focus on restoring these areas, primarily in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley where the most extensive loss of forested wetlands has occurred. Much of the restoration activity has been funded through the Wetland Reserve Program, which encourages afforestation of agricultural areas and supports conservation easements of up to 30 years or into perpetuity.

Through the Wetland Reserve Program and several other restoration programs, about 195,000 acres in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley have been replanted. However, the full restoration of wetland functions requires much more than tree cover. The effects of massive deforestation, extensive drainage systems, and channelization of streams and rivers make restoration of geomorphic, hydrologic, and ecological processes extremely difficult. Wetland restoration activities will require long-term efforts extending far beyond initial tree planting.

A regulatory effort is the mitigation of wetland losses. These projects, carried out under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, have been applied in several locations. However, a lack of systematic record keeping and monitoring prevents a regional assessment of their effectiveness. Some local assessments of these programs indicate that they may have only limited success in replacing the wetland functions lost through permitted conversions.

This Assessment of aquatic species highlights the prevalence and importance of endemism, in which a species’ range is limited to a narrow geographic area. Crayfish, reptiles, fish, and snail species of concern are predominantly endemic. As a result, local actions can have substantial impacts on local species persistence, so that in some cases altering even small amounts of habitat can have significant implications. This potentially disproportionate impact of small actions places a high value on disseminating information on the locations and natural histories of endemic species.

Several focal areas for aquatic species are defined by this analysis. One is northern Florida, including the Panhandle, which has a concentration of rare reptiles, amphibians, snails, and crayfish. Rare mussels and snails are concentrated in the Mobile and Tennessee River Systems. The Southern Appalachians also have a very high concentration of the rare amphibians. These are areas where aquatic ecosystems are especially susceptible to structural changes in aquatic and adjacent terrestrial ecosystems.

Forest management usually has a relatively small role to play in the persistence of aquatic species. Habitats of mussels and snails have been completely restructured by damming and sedimentation from large-scale land use conversions. These impacts are essentially irreversible. For some species, forest management approaches play important roles in species persistence. BMPs that reduce sedimentation and maintain streamside vegetation are especially important in protecting species that depend on streamside habitats. These include crayfish, amphibians, snails, and insects, especially in areas of concentration defined above. Conversely, forest practices or other activities that disturb habitats along streams can have a disproportionately significant impact on certain aquatic species.