Wetland issues

Our fondness for some predetermined cultural landscape requires constant inputs of energy to restrict change through succession. The homogenization of urban landscapes was often exported to smaller communities as some sort of ideal to be emulated without regard to the unique components of each bioregion and watershed. And of course, in the natural world one landscape flows into another without defined boundaries. It is often the transition areas that are difficult to create or define. We tend to focus on and value the created habitat forest, field, pond rather then the subtle changing gradients which flow one to the other. All add value to the landscape.

Wetlands are characterized by alternating periods of flooding followed by a period of low water or drying (seasonally or yearly). It is not easy to create the precise boundaries between these fluctuations and their location within the wetland. Despite our best intentions in creating some ideal wetland, plants and animals have evolved to find their own level of tolerance for these varying degrees of wetness. It is the shifting of wet and dry periods, soil saturation, and water depth superimposed over different substrates with differing hydrological characteristics which makes wetlands so diverse and difficult to create. Wet land importance is as much the result of the individual character or successional stage of site specific wetlands, as it is the mosaic of wetlands found in each community, watershed or bioregion. Changes in water depth determine the mix of aquatic plants which can or cannot grow in a particular wetland. A seed bank lies in the bottom sediments for decades waiting for the correct conditions for germination and growth.

A seed bank in wetland soils waits for the correct hydrological conditions for germination and growth.

It is the dynamic nature of succession which makes it difficult for ecologists to place value on particular wetlands. For example, most of the Lake Ontario barrier beach wetlands form when waves pile sand along the stream exit to the lake. These wetlands have had a checkered history based on the unpredict able breaching of the sand dams by waves during storms. Any one of these wetlands may be preferable from a plant or animal point of view but all are on a continuum of re-birth after the sudden loss of the dam which backed up the water that gave birth to the wetland in the first place. And any that are judged to be of greater value today may lose that value during next years storms. It is then the "lesser" wetlands that will mature to support those characteristics used to class wetlands. Wetlands are dynamic and at the mercy of hydrological cycles affected by events upstream. The number of wetlands found at different successional stages in one area will determine what habitat diversity is available to attract wild life to the watershed or bioregion. Sometimes the presence of wetlands within the urban environment surprises us. This is in part due to the inherent resilience of species adapted to disturbances, to drying and flooding, as natural succession progresses over time.

Lake Ontario barrier beach wetlands form when waves pile sand along the stream exit of the lake.	The spotted salamander is found in rich woodlands and breeds in woodland ponds.