Bob Berwyn:
"SUMMIT COUNTY — For years, land managers and elected officials have permitted the destruction of ecologically valuable wetlands under the assumption that those areas can be replaced somewhere else with artificially created wetlands.
That development model has created a billion-dollar-per-year wetlands restoration industry, but a recent study suggests that restored wetlands rarely reach the quality of a natural wetland.
“Once you degrade a wetland, it doesn’t recover its normal assemblage of plants or its rich stores of organic soil carbon, which both affect natural cycles of water and nutrients, for many years,” said David Moreno-Mateos, a University of California, Berkeley, postdoctoral fellow. “Even after 100 years, the restored wetland is still different from what was there before, and it may never recover...”
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