Wetlands Habitat

[Carmine Osterland]

Forbidding Fens
From Swamp Thing to Wuthering Heights, wetlands are traditional settings for myths and ghost stories. One of the earliest written stories in the English language, Beowulf, takes place near a fen, or bog, in Scandinavia. One of the main characters in Beowulf, the monster Grendel, lives in a cave beneath the fen.

Ghost Airport
In the 1970s, Floridas Miami-Dade Aviation Department planned to build a 101-square-kilometer (39-square-mile) airport complex and transportation corridor in the southern Florida wetlands. The Everglades Jetport would have blocked the flow of water into the Everglades, causing untold environmental damage. A group of activists, helped by the first-ever environmental impact study, successfully stopped the venture.

Soggy Cities
Some of the biggest cities in the U.S. were built on top of wetlands, including Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California; and Washington, D.C. In fact, the "tidal basin" in front of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., often floods the surrounding sidewalks with water from the Potomac River.

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Coastal wetlands are some of the most productive ecosystems on Earth. They are crucial for healthy estuaries, which generate approximately half of commercially harvested seafood in the United States. The quantity and quality of our seafood is directly related to the quality and extent of wetland habitats.

In 2018, U.S. commercial and recreational fisheries supported 1.7 million jobs and contributed $238 billion in sales. Coastal communities that support these industries depend on healthy habitats for continued seafood production.

Wetlands provide countless opportunities for recreation, from hunting and fishing, to hiking, to observing wildlife. More than a third of all U.S. adults hunt, fish, birdwatch, or photograph wildlife found in natural wetlands. Visitors to beaches and coastal habitats are a major economic driver for local communities, supporting substantial revenue and job growth.

By providing spawning grounds, food, and refuge for young fish, wetlands support a robust recreational fishing industry. In 2018, anglers generated more than $72 billion in sales impact and supported 470,000 U.S. jobs.

Eighteen percent of U.S. oil production and almost 25 percent of U.S. natural gas production originates in, is transported through, or is processed in Louisiana coastal wetlands. If you drive a car, cook, or heat your home, you might be using oil or gas that traveled through coastal wetlands.

Wetlands act as natural water purifiers, filtering sediment and absorbing pollution. Runoff from hard surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and rooftops is a leading cause of water pollution. Development and agriculture contribute extra nutrients, pesticides, and silt to local waterways. Wetlands trap and filter these impurities, maintaining healthy rivers, bays, and beaches.

Wetlands act as natural sponges, absorbing and temporarily storing floodwaters. By holding back some of the floodwaters and slowing the rate that water enters a river or stream, wetlands can reduce the severity of downstream flooding and erosion. Wetlands can lower overall flood heights, protecting people, property, infrastructure, and agriculture from devastating flood damages. This protection saves vulnerable coastal communities $23 billion each year.

Salt marshes, seagrass beds, and mangroves play an important role in addressing climate change by removing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing them in plants and in the soil. Coastal blue carbon is the term used for carbon that is stored in these coastal habitats.

Some of the most dramatic coastal wetland loss is occurring in Louisiana. In the lifetime of a child born today, approximately 800,000 acres of Louisiana wetlands will disappear, pushing the coastline inland as much as 33 miles in some areas.

This loss of habitat has significant economic and social consequences. For example, habitat degradation and loss has reduced the size and diversity of fish populations. This in turn decreases opportunities for commercial and recreational fisheries.

Almost half of the U.S. population lives in coastal counties. Over time, humans have significantly altered coastal and marine habitats, including coastal wetlands. Development, infrastructure, agriculture, and other human activities have played a role in the disappearance, degradation, and disconnection of wetland habitat.

For example, dikes, tide gates, and ditches have disconnected rivers from their historic floodplains. This limits the amount of floodwaters that wetlands are able to soak up, putting nearby communities at risk of frequent flooding.

If you live near a river, even hundreds of miles from the coast, that river eventually flows into a coastal wetland. Rivers pick up excess fertilizer, pesticides, and sediment as they flow downstream. These pollutants can then accumulate in wetlands.

At the same time, wetlands can provide protection from the effects of climate change, such as flooding caused by more extreme weather. During Hurricane Sandy, for example, wetlands protected areas of the East Coast from more than $625 million in direct flood damages. But the continued loss of coastal wetlands means less protection for coastal communities from the impacts of strong storms.

We sponsor, fund, and advise habitat restoration projects involving state, local, and non-profit organizations. Our partners are essential to wetland restoration: they identify community needs, multiply our grant dollars, raise local awareness, and bring volunteers.

The Aquarium hosts a monthly habitat restoration event at the Los Cerritos Wetlands. This is your opportunity to visit and learn about our local wetlands, help the environment, and support the Aquarium of the Pacific.

Restoration will focus on non-native weed removal and rare native plant conservation. These events will be led by trained naturalists and local educators, offering a great opportunity for local residents to learn more about the Los Cerritos Wetlands, while getting hands-on involvement with the restoration.

Meeting Place: Participants will be met and greeted by Los Cerritos Wetlands staff at the corner of Pacific Coast Hwy and 1st. Street in Seal Beach. Arriving around 10:15 a.m. is recommended.

Please Bring: The wetlands are wildlands, so please dress accordingly. Closed-toe shoes are required. Hat and sunscreen are recommended. Drinking water will be provided, but this is a plastic water bottle-free event. Please bring a reusable water bottle.

The Heard sanctuary has five habitats including Blackland prairie, wetlands, bottomland forest, upland forest and white rock escarpment. Each habitat is unique and offers a variety of plants and animals that live in specific environments.

A prairie habitat is an ecosystem dominated by grasses, small broad-leaved plants and wildflowers. Prairies are level or hilly grasslands usually characterized by deep, fertile soil with almost no shrubs or trees. Trees may be present, but less than 10% of the area in these broad tracts of land has a tree canopy. Typical grasses of the North Texas native grassland such as here at the Heard Wildlife Sanctuary are big bluestem, little bluestem, switch grass and yellow Indian grass. You may see good examples of these on the Bluestem Trail.

Prairies were maintained naturally for thousands of years in part by grazing animals such as bison and pronghorn, and browsers like deer. Natural prairie fires burned off the dry brown thatch that the grazing animals missed. The fires killed the woody saplings that otherwise would have encroached upon the prairies.

In 1990, the Heard created a 50-acre wetland area within the floodplain of Wilson Creek. These wetlands have expanded and increased the quality of wildlife habitat for wetland species, lessened the impact of floodwaters from upstream areas of Wilson Creek and provided a venue for public education.

Water from heavy rain runs into the wetlands bringing with it pollutants like motor oil and gas that accumulate on roads, chemicals like fertilizer, and litter from roadsides. Not only do the wetlands help slow down flood water and help protect property down-stream, all the organisms from the microscopic phytoplankton to the aquatic plants begin the process of cleaning up all of the man-made pollution in the water.

A boardwalk allows visitors to experience much of the wetlands and its resident wildlife. Increased presence of migratory shorebirds, wintering waterfowl and breeding neo-tropical songbirds has also been recorded at the Heard wetlands in the years since its establishment.

Wetlands serve as nurseries for fish. Many birds, especially waterfowl, build nests and raise their young in wetlands. Migratory birds depend on food from the wetlands that lie on the way of their route, and in the south, many birds winter in the wetlands.

Bottomland hardwood forests are found along rivers and streams of the southeast and south central United States, generally in broad floodplains. In the case of the Heard, it is found around our wetlands and our Heron Slough and along Wilson Creek. These ecosystems are commonly found wherever streams or rivers at least occasionally cause flooding beyond their channel confines. They are deciduous forested wetlands, made up of various species that have the ability to survive in areas with variable water levels. These forests serve a critical role in the watershed by reducing the risk and severity of flooding to downstream communities. In the case of our bottomland forest, it is also critical because it provides areas to store floodwater originating upstream in McKinney. In addition, these wetlands improve water quality by filtering and flushing nutrients, processing organic wastes, and reducing sediment before it reaches open water.

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