Compensating for Wetland Losses Under the Clean Water Act (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
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In recent years, concern about the loss of wetlands in the United States has led to federal efforts to protect wetlands on both public and private lands. Provisions in the Clean Water Act especially, the Food Security Act, several court rulings, and government policies, regulations, and directives regulate discharge of pollutants to wetlands and the filling of wetlands.
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The Committee on Mitigating Wetland Losses, which prepared this report, was established by the National Research Council to evaluate how well and under what conditions compensatory mitigation required under Section 404 is contributing toward satisfying the overall objective of restoring and maintaining the quality of the nation's waters. The committee reviewed examples of wetland restoration and creation projects in Florida, Illinois, and southern California that were required as a condition of Section 404 permits; received briefings from outside experts; and conducted an extensive review of the scientific literature on wetlands, government data and reports, and information provided by a wide variety of experts and organizations.
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Further, the literature on compensatory mitigation suggests that required mitigation projects often are not undertaken or fail to meet permit conditions. Therefore, the committee is not convinced that the goal of no net loss for permitted wetlands is being met for wetland functions.
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Even with a suitable position in the landscape, the ability to establish desired wetland functions will depend on the particular function, the restoration or creation approach used, and the degree of degradation at the compensation site. Landscape position, hydrological variability, species richness, biological dynamics, and hydrological regime all are important factors that affect wetland restoration and mitigation of loss.
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· Riparian wetlands should receive special attention and protection, because their value for stream water quality and overall stream health cannot be duplicated in any other landscape position. A mitigation site needs to have the ability to become self-sustaining.
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In other cases, the location of the mitigation site within the watershed could not provide the necessary hydrological conditions and hence the desired plant and animal communities, including buffers and uplands, necessary to achieve the desired wetland functions. At some sites, compliance criteria were being met, but the hydrological variability that is a defining feature of a wetland had not been established.
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· The Corps of Engineers and other responsible regulatory authorities should use a functional assessment protocol that recognizes the watershed perspective to establish permitter compensation requirements. · Dependence on subjective, best professional judgment in assessing wetland function should be replaced by science-based, rapid assessment procedures that incorporate at least the following characteristics: effectively assess goals of wetland mitigation projects; assess all recognized functions; incorporate effects of position in landscape; reliably indicate important wetland processes, or at least scientifically established structural surrogates of those processes; scale assessment results to results from reference sites; are sensitive to changes in performance over a dynamic range; are integrative over space and time; and generate parametric and dimensioned units, rather than nonparametric rank.
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In addition to using a watershed framework, the federal regulatory authorities can work to improve functional wetland assessment, permit compliance monitoring, staff training, research, and collaboration with state agencies. The committee recommends that the Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, and other responsible regulatory authorities take several specific actions.
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. Accordingly, the committee recommends that when an agency reviews mitigation options, it is most important to focus on their characteristics or attributes (e.g., who is legally responsible, the timing of the mitigation actions, whether the Mitigation Banking Review Team process is used, and whether stewardship requirements are in place)
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10 COMPENSATING FOR WETLAND LOSSES UNDER THE CLEAN WATER ACT CONCLUSION The Clean Water Act Section 404 program should be improved to achieve the goal of no net loss of wetlands for both area and functions. The above recommendations will help to achieve this goal.
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