Approach
This approach aims to alleviate drought stress in wetlands prone to increased drying. To meet the goals of this approach, managers should consider tactics they can apply at different scales, including the wetland-scale, adjacent uplands and buffers, and areas on the landscape physically conducive to groundwater recharge. Non-floodplain (“geographically isolated”) wetlands are especially effective at meeting water infiltration and storage functions. Tactics here address slowing the rate of flow to and from wetlands. By improving the water-holding capacity of wetlands, this approach also contributes to watershed-scale flood management by mitigating the impacts of downstream flooding due to extreme precipitation and runoff.
Tactics
- Maintain or create buffers within at least the first 100 meters (328 feet) surrounding a wetland.
- Implement proper road and construction maintenance and best management practices for forestry activities to control erosion.
- In developed areas, install and maintain bioswales, rain gardens, large cisterns, and rain barrels (for slow release to adjacent wetlands) alongside impervious surfaces (e.g., paved roads, parking lots), and install pervious pavers instead of continuous pavement.
- In agricultural areas, incorporate deep-rooted perennials and native perennials or cover crops into fields to reduce runoff rates and improve infiltration. Grassy waterways/swales, contour/strip cropping, and no-till.
- Limit water extraction from confined aquifers to maintain groundwater supply and connectivity to nonfloodplain wetlands. Minimize disturbance to these small wetlands to improve water storage and groundwater recharge at watershed scales.
Strategy
Strategy Text
This strategy outlines resistance and resilience approaches to manage wetlands facing altered water budgets (water inputs, storage capacity, and outputs) due to a changing climate. Hydrology is a leading driver of wetland character and function and so expected changes to hydrologic regimes, hydrodynamics, and water levels concern wetland managers. Projections in the Upper Midwest indicate that wetlands will be influenced both by extreme precipitation and flooding events and longer drought periods between rain events. Some wetlands will become dryer and others may become wetter than long-term averages. Thus, managers face challenges (i.e., extreme flooding; drought) and opportunities (i.e., restored flood pulses to wetlands disconnected from surface or groundwater flows) in managing wetlands in the context of climate change. Restoring hydrologic connectivity has historically been a primary tactic of management efforts to restore wetlands lost or degraded by filling or draining due to land-use conversion and water extraction, and many of those same tactics can be applied or amended by wetland managers to meet climate change adaptation objectives. Restoring hydrologic connectivity and ameliorating saturated, anoxic conditions that limit decomposition also supports the capacity of wetlands to actively remove and sequester atmospheric carbon and mitigates future carbon losses.