Wetland Loss in the United States: ASWM 2015 Report

Since the Association of State Wetland Managers (ASWM) recently released a Status and Trends Report on State Wetland Manager Programs in the United States, I thought I would post the information regarding wetland loss in the United States and provide details on the four-state area and Texas.

​In reviewing the ASWM trends report, it turns out that the wetland loss data used by most states comes primarily from a 1990 report (directed by Congress in 1989) principally authored by USFWS Thomas E. Dahl of the National Wetlands Inventory in St. Peterburg, Florida.

​Below you can see the color-coded map by state and general percentage of wetland area loss.

​The chart below details the amounts of historic wetland losses from the 1780s to 1990s for five states:

​For other state summaries, click here.

You can see why President George H. W. Bush established the national policy of “no-net loss of wetlands” in 1989.  This policy set the groundwork to replace each newly impacted wetland with a replacement wetland of the same size and with similar wetland functions and values.  No-net-loss did not mean to imply no wetland impacts were allowable.  Wetlands may still be impacted, but those impacts must be replaced by additional wetlands via on-site creation, off-site mitigation banking or a combination of the two. Also, mitigation requirement ratios generally seen for impacts are more than 1:1.

-JMB

Sources:
Status and Trends Report on State Wetland Programs in the United States, Association of State Wetland Managers, 2015 (Last Updated 10/30/2015), by Dr. Brenda Zollitsch, and Jeanne Christie
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​http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/water/wetlands/         
Natural Resources Conservation Services website, United States Department of Agriculture
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Dahl, T.E. 1990. Wetland Losses in the United States 1780’s to 1980’s, U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, D.C. 13 pp. [Report to Congress.]

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