00:00:15 Liz

Hello and welcome to naturally speaking podcast. I'm Liz, a Digital Media Intern for Nature Up North , and I'll be your host for this podcast. Diving into the world of wetlands.

00:00:27 Liz

You may be going to listen to the podcast I made last spring where I discussed wetlands with Doctor Jessica Pearson and her work with managing the invasive plant purple loose strife. If you haven't already listened, go check it out. In this podcast, I want to be exploring another aspect of wetlands, their management.

00:00:45 Liz

First of all, here's the definition of a wetland.

00:01:03 Tom Langen

A wetland is, I mean basically a body of water that is shallow enough that rooted plants can grow throughout it and so. Wetlands can include swamps, marshes, bogs, fens, vernal pools. So lots of different kinds of water bodies that have that common feature, that they're pretty shallow.f

00:01:17 Liz

That was Tom Langan, a professor of biology and psychology at Clarkston University.

00:01:22 Liz

Doctor Langen does research on wetland restoration, road ecology, and endangered species conservation and works with consults or volunteers with many environmentally minded organizations. Here's Doctor Langan with a bit more of what work he does with wetlands in the North Country.

00:01:39 Tom Langen

So I do a couple of different things. So as a as a professor I've been, I and my students and my collaborators have been looking at wetland restoration projects in the North Country and evaluating them in terms of things like how they serve for biodiversity and water quality and other things so.

00:02:06 Tom Langen

The US Department of Agriculture's branch, the National Resources Conservation Service, does wetland restorations on private property in areas where wetlands have been lost because of agriculture.

00:02:23 Tom Langen

And so the USDA Department of Agriculture for almost 2 centuries provided financial support and incentives for farmers to drain wetlands, to remove wetlands, and they were very effective, You know in the US in the lower 48 states, something like 95% of the wetlands were lost mainly for agriculture, but sometimes for suburban development things.

00:02:52 Tom Langen

So starting in the 1980s, late 80s, a program to roll that back a little bit in terms of restoring wetlands, in fact, the USDA no longer provides incentives to drain wetlands, but in fact to restore them. And so they've done this probably well well over 200 restored wetlands just in St Lawrence and Jefferson County and maybe in Franklin, a lot of them.

00:03:24 Tom Langen

Private land owners have chosen to have a wetland restored on their property and in most of those cases put under a permanent conservation easement. So they're permanently protected, and so the question that we look at is, these wetlands, are they any good?

00:03:43 Tom Langen

Are they similar to natural wetlands in terms of the plants and animals? In terms of the microbial. Terms of water quality in terms of the ecological buffers around them and so forth.

00:03:58 Tom Langen

And so we've we've looked at many of those wetlands and we've we found that indeed, they're pretty good. They're good value in terms of conservation.

00:04:10 Liz

You may be wondering why good quality wetlands are so important? What do they do for the environment and for humans that’s so valuable?

00:04:17 Liz

This comes down to the numerous ecosystem services that wetlands provide. But what are ecosystem services and why are they so important? Ecosystem services are the benefits that humans receive from the natural functioning of an ecosystem. Terrestrial examples of ecosystem services include pollination plants or animals with medicinal properties and food.

00:04:41 Liz

Here's Doctor Langan with an in depth look of the ecosystem services that wetlands provide.

00:04:47 Tom Langen

Some of these important services are related to the management of water dealing with floods, dealing with groundwater regeneration, storage of water. So they make water availability and the impact of water better for people who live in a region.

00:05:11 Tom Langen

A second big class of ecosystem benefits are related to environmental toxins and biogeochemical cycles. So wetlands are really important for the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, mercury, all kinds of things. And so in an agricultural landscape or urban landscape, wetlands can sort of collect and for some pollutants, detoxify them or break them down. For others, it can sequester them.

00:05:48 Tom Langen

A third sort of class of ecosystem services are the plants and animals that live in wetlands so wetlands really, you know, even are kind of the crossroads for lots of plants and animals. There's plants and animals that are dependent on wetlands that only occur there. But there's many others that occur in other places but go to wetlands periodically for different parts of their life, so probably the most obvious ones to us up here are the amphibians that that breed in wetlands and then they might move to the uplands frogs and salamanders and such, but lots of mammals go to wetlands to hunt, to feed, to get water and other things. There's a very high diversity of plants and animals around wetlands, although that diversity really depends on which wetlands were talking about.

00:06:41 Tom Langen

So that's important. The final sort of group of ecosystem services is that some people like landscapes with wetlands in them. We've seen a scenic scene as interesting places to recreate for hunting or fishing or looking gathering plants. People who use medicinal plants, there's lots of medicinal plants, often around associated with wetlands.

00:07:09 Tom Langen

So they're important features for a healthy landscape in terms of what people perceive as healthy landscape.

00:07:21 Liz

Now, knowing how important a wetland is, how can you assess the quality of a wetland? This is part of Doctor Langan's work.

00:07:30 Tom Langen

So we look at rtings that help indicate the quality. In fact, we've done 1 project where we try to evaluate different ways of assessing how healthy a wetland is, so we call these indicators right.

00:07:45 Liz

OK.

00:07:49 Tom Langen

And so if you work for, say, the EPA, there's three sort of levels of evaluation and the first is you use a geographic information systems, GIS, aerial photographs and you look at the wetland from the aerial photographs and you can judge some things about its quality.

00:08:10 Tom Langen

Does it have a buffer of vegetation around it. Does it have a complex shoreline, or is it very simple. And so, you know, the first level of evaluation is based on this, what we call remote sensing, that sort of measuring not in place.

00:08:32 Tom Langen

The second level, we call it Tier 2, is when you go out to the place and you have a checklist and you do a checklist. Is there native wetland vegetation, check, is there a buffer, check. Is there evidence of  wetland requiring birds? Check. And so you basically do a one day quick and dirty evaluation and you can use that and your remote sensing to make a judgement.

00:09:01 Tom Langen

The third level, which is the one that we used, looked at most carefully, is to actually look at different things that indicate different features about the environmental quality.

00:09:13 Tom Langen

So we've looked at birds, and particularly focusing on wetland associated birds. amphibians and reptiles, turtles, snakes, frogs, salamanders, fish, aquatic plants, and microbes and then water quality.

00:09:37 Tom Langen

And so you get data on all of those and those require like for turtles, you have to go there three days with Nets and traps and try to find them. For the frogs you have to go three nights across the year, the summer to record what frogs are calling so you get little bits and pieces of all of those. And then there's kind of a rating system to say, you know, are these really highly associated with wetlands?

00:10:07 Tom Langen

Are they not so sensitive? Are they really upland? And so we look at all of those and then sort of in aggregate you can rank the environmental quality of the wetlands.

00:10:19 Tom Langen

So we do that for restored wetlands, these kind of agricultural wetlands. We have what we call reference wetlands, which are natural wetlands in the same landscape. So you want to ask, OK, in an agricultural landscape, here is a natural wetland and a restored wetland.

00:10:38 Tom Langen

Are they similar or different? And so we compare those. Now we also compared, we, there's the Messena it's actually the Messena, Cornwall, Akwesasne, Great Lakes area of concern along the lake along the Saint Lawrence River near Messena, New York and Cornwall, ON.

00:10:58 Tom Langen

So we've looked at the wetlands there. Particularly in the New York portion outside of Akwesasne, and compared those wetlands to wetlands that are along the river in a similar context but outside of the AOC, the area of concern.

00:11:20 Tom Langen

And so we've, we've done those. And so between these different datasets, we have natural wetlands in the Saint Lawrence Valley, we have wetlands in a highly disturbed kind of urbanized or highly constructed environment which is around Massena, and then we have wetlands all across the farm lands in the North Country. And so we use these ecological indicators. And we see where do wetlands fall and we try to evaluate which ones are seem to be the most reliable, give the best picture. Which ones tend to be a little noisier, or maybe some indicators are good at distinguishing really disturbed from OK nut among OK to good are all the same. Some, you know, they're really bad, and then they're good at distinguishing, like different levels of better environmental quality.

00:12:19 Tom Langen

So we, we evaluate those indicators and then we use those to try to understand, answer the question you know is the AOC that area concern, Is it recovered or is it still show evidence of degradation from the activities as compared to other wetlands in the area? Because in the case of a Great Lakes area of concern, the goal is to restore those to being similar to other wetland’s environmental quality outside of it. Similarly are the agricultural the restored wetlands in the agricultural landscape. Are these similar to the natural wetlands?

00:12:59 Tom Langen

And you know, we find kind of what you would expect. You know the natural wetlands are the best, but the agricultural restorations many of those are as good. AOC is not so good.

00:13:20 Tom Langen

It's helpful for being able to evaluate it and then ask questions like why is it that some of the restorations are not as good as is natural wetlands.

00:13:33 Liz

I mean one of the things we find is its context that matters. So if you restore a wetland near a couple of native natural wetlands, they do a lot better because they get colonized by plants and animals from the nearby wetlands and there's some connectivity things, so, but a restored wetland that's in a really an agricultural area where all of the wetlands have been long removed, so it's kind of isolated they're not as good, but if you look at the other side in terms of value added, that wetland well, sure it's not as good as those wetlands where there's native wetland, natural wetlands nearby, it's adding a lot to the landscape.

00:14:16 Tom Langen

The ecosystem services, that it’s adding are otherwise absent and quite valuable, whereas restoring a wetland near these other wetlands, it's really good. But then, you know, it's actually redundant on the ecosystem services that are already being provided by the other wetlands.

00:14:35 Liz

Right.

00:14:35 Tom Langen

So there's lots of interesting sort of management issues that come up.

00:14:40 Liz

As Doctor Langen mentioned, challenges and strategies are specific to the type of wetlands that needs management. In our interview, Doctor Langen outlined three of these types of wetlands, natural wetlands, restored wetlands, and created wetlands.

00:14:54 Liz

A natural wetland is one that is naturally occurring and still there, but may be degraded due to human activities such as agriculture and development. Management could be needed to keep this wetland functioning well.

00:15:06 Liz

A restored wetland can be established in a place where wetland once was, but has been removed for agriculture or developmental purposes. Projects focused on restoring wetlands are very common in Saint Lawrence County.

00:15:16 Liz

Lastly, a created wetland can be established in a place where there wasn't previously a wetland, by digging out the area to allow water to flow in.

00:15:25 Tom Langen

So if you're creating a wetland, right, you have to actually there has to be time for wetland soils to develop. There’s particular soils with wetlands there has to be a way that wetland plants can colonize it.There are techniques. So for example, something as simple as taking a few bucketfuls of muck from an existing wetland. It's full of wetland plant seeds and also wetland microbes, and dumping it into a new one you can. Boost up or power up the range of plants that are settling there and trying to get an edge on establishment of native wetland plants and native wetland communities, rather than introduced invasive species, which many of our wetlands have.

00:16:17 Liz

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

00:16:19 Tom Langen

Yeah, if it's a. If it's a restored wetland. Sometimes you have some of those features already still there. So that gives you a start, but you still have to do those things with plans. It often wetlands when they're restored, they either create when you either recreate like a berm to hold water back. Or you kind of dig out an area that has been leveled in the past. Usually you take out many of our old farms, have tiling, which that was intended to move water out. You have to remove that so the water stays. And then you might put like a little water control structure. And so one of the things that becomes important if you're managing a restored wetland is letting that water level fluctuate.

00:17:07 Tom Langen

You get wetlands function better when they occasionally dry, and then they fill up.

00:17:15 Tom Langen

OK.

00:17:15 Tom Langen

If it's an, if it's a natural wetland, you know, even those a lot of those have been impact like reduced, you know maybe development there, one of the things is re-establishing native plants along the edge of it. So creating kind of a buffer and a transition zone from the wetland to the uplands. So restoring those can be helpful.

00:17:41 Tom Langen

Sometimes removing invasive plants that have come in that's more difficult. And it can be dealing with things like excessive nutrient runoff from nearby farms now depends on what your intention with that or what ecosystem services are most important.

00:18:02 Tom Langen

This is where it becomes, you know, what is that wetland mainly for?

00:18:07 Tom Langen

So if you're trying to conserve threatened or endangered species that are in a wetland, you might want to reduce the impact of agricultural runoff. If you're you that wetland part of its main ecosystem, services that you want to use is for it to break down or deal with those agricultural runoff toxins then it's just fine. Then you want to, you know, encourage that or encourage features in that wetland that will help the with wetland plants and sedimentation to break down contaminants and sequester nutrients.

00:18:46 Liz

Would you also then kind of want to have, like a separate wetland space for the species that might not then be able to use the wetlands that is designated for breaking down.

00:18:58

Yeah.

00:18:59 Tom Langen

Yeah, you have to start thinking it if you're. If you're doing environmental management or conservation science, you want to think about like this. Wetlands and different wetlands have different functions, and they're not all equal, for example. In our area, there's a Walmart, and on the Walmart there's a big wetland in the front of it, right by the parking lot that everyone sees and there's geese there and things like that.

00:19:24 Tom Langen

Well, that wetland was created. It's next to a natural wetland. The Walmart is directly adjacent to a very large natural wetland, but that area was intentionally constructed to take run off from the big parking lot so that that runoff would not go into the natural wetland. So it conserves a natural wetland, which has blandings, turtles and some other threatened species.

00:19:46 Liz

Right.

00:19:53 Tom Langen

It goes into this large this this basically created wetland and that's supposed to sequester then the runoff toxins from the parking lot. So road salt hydrocarbons from like oil and gas and rubber running off of breaking off of tires, metals and other things. So it's actually probably pretty nasty. You know the water quality is not going to be great, but it's intentionally so.

00:20:23 Liz

Considering all these aspects of wetland management, I asked Doctor Langan about wetlands in the North Country today. Here's what he had to say.

00:20:31 Tom Langen

You know, we are in an area that is unusual in how much how much wetland cover we have. So there is I think St. Lawrence County is about 15% surface water.

00:20:46

OK.

00:20:46 Tom Langen

We have lots and lots of wetlands. Jefferson County, maybe a little fewer, but still quite a bit. And we've got, you know, what we call fluvial wetlands wetlands along rivers. So, you know, all of our rivers, the abatements, have wetlands, and on the St. Lawrence River.

00:21:02 Tom Langen

There are big wetlands along the river's edge. We have lakes we have marshes. We have vernal pools and things like that, bogs and fence, so we have a lot of wetlands.

00:21:18 Tom Langen

The challenge is more degradation of wetlands and trying to manage wetland areas in ways that conserves the biodiversity that's there and serves to protect water quality overall.

00:21:39 Tom Langen

Now one of the bright sides is, I mean, we naturally have a lot of wetlands in a lot of places where there were wetlands, then maybe we're ditched and farmed then eventually, we're abandoned for agriculture and have gone back into wetland.

00:21:55

Moreover, we have the ecological engineer that is outstanding for creating wetlands, Beavers, right? And the American Beaver are Beavers that produce a lot of wetlands. We actually have a net increase in wetlands in the region and that's primarily caused by Beavers.

00:22:18 Tom Langen

We have the highest density of Beavers in the world in the northern.

00:22:21 Liz

Wow.

00:22:23 Tom Langen

The North End of the Adirondack, supposedly. So we have that right, that's a positive.

00:22:34 Liz

Beavers are ecosystem engineers, so they're super important for constructing wetlands. Did you know they're also New York State's official mammal? If you want to learn more about Beavers, go check out the blog Beneficial Beavers on our website.

00:22:48 Liz

So New York State has a lot of wetlands and even more being created by Beavers. However, there's many threats and pressures that these wetlands face.

00:22:57 Tom Langen

We have a lot of nutrient pollution. We have fertilizer runoff particularly in cornfields, so people tend to use corn is a very nitrogen hungry plant, but to boost yield, people tend to really use very high, large quantities of fertilizer, and it runs off into our water bodies. And so that comes into the marshes.

00:23:26 Tom Langen

You can actually kind of detect that because if you notice that the lots and lots of cattails everywhere, right? Cattails, like corn, is a real nitrogen needy plant.

00:23:39 Liz

Oh, OK.

00:23:40 Tom Langen

So where you see a lot of cattails, it's usually because it's receiving a lot of nutrients or it's very nutrient rich. So we have fertilizer runoff. We also have a lot of animal agriculture and so we have animal agriculture runoff. Now our agricultural systems have changed. So we don't have as much free ranging and pasture cattle, we do maybe on Amish farms, but in general that's less.

00:24:11 Tom Langen

But we have a lot of confined animal feeding operations. Cafo's and they produce a lot of manure as well. So there's still a lot of manure, and so it's usually spread on hay fields, or, you know, land. And so that also so then runs into water bodies. It is a source of that nutrient pollution of the wetlands. Now, one way you can look at that is that's exactly what the ecosystem services that wetlands provide is to take care of that.

00:24:42 Tom Langen

It's good that we have those, but it's a stressor. Another stressor is along roads road salt. And you know, we use a lot of salt in this area and that affects water bodies. And if you notice, if you keep an eye on the landscape, you'll see how the spread and proliferation of phragmites. So Phragmites is introduced invasive species. It’s actually a hybrid between European phragmites and a North American native phragmites thatwas restricted to the estuaries along the coast, and so the two species hybridized.

00:25:25 Tom Langen

The freshwater one from Europe and the saltwater one from North America and so now it goes very well in brackish freshwater that is run off from roads, and so the Phragmites invasion start at the roadsides, and then they move in.

00:25:44 Liz

OK.

00:25:44 Tom Langen

So we're seeing that numbers, abundance of that or the coverage of that growing very fast.

00:25:51 Tom Langen

You know, there's other other invasive plants, purple loose strife. So the wetlands, you know, they're getting challenged by invasive species of plants. They get challenged by all this nutrient enrichment and then also toxins like the salts and other things.

00:26:06 Tom Langen

But then also wetlands serve the purpose of helping to deal with those nutrients.In sequestering some of that brackish water so it doesn't go into lakes and rivers and things.

00:26:19 Liz

Interrupting the interview with Tom Lingen briefly for our Nature Nugget. This nature nugget has to do with local wetland management here in Saint Lawrence County.

00:26:29 Donatella

You can see wetland management in action at upper and Lower Lakes Wildlife Management area. In 2024 through 2025, a temporary water draw down is taking place to allow for the DEC, The Department of Environmental Conservation to make upgrades to the water control structure.

00:26:46 Donatella

According to the DEC press release, these upgrades will improve water level management capabilities and allow for better management of the marsh habitat.

00:26:55 Donatella

The Upper and Lower Lakes Wildlife Management Area has two 937 acres of important wetland habitat to many birds, such as bald eagles, marshlands, black terns, mammals like beavers and muskrats, blandings turtles, many frog species, and migratory waterfowl.

00:27:13 Donatella

It's a valued stop during bird migration and has a variety of habitats to offer.

00:27:18 Donatella

If you were to go on a hike at Indian Creek Nature Center, out to the observation tower during this time, you would likely notice that the wetlands are looking pretty dry.

00:27:28 Donatella

If you're listening to this podcast through the Nature Up North website, you'll find images of the drained wetland on the web page.

00:27:34 Donatella

This is because of the drawdown. A drawdown is when wetland managers lower water levels temporarily. Wetlands naturally have cyclical water level, so while this drought on is more significant than most natural fluctuations, it won't do major harm to the ecosystem and is actually beneficial.

00:27:53 Donatella

Furthermore, the product was done in coordination with DEC fisheries and wildlife staff to minimize any potential impacts to species that utilize the wetlands, particularly blandings turtles piled billed greves and black turtles.

00:28:08 Donatella

Drawdowns are not part of yearly management of the area and are only carried out when necessary to upgrade structural integrity or to manage the vegetation. Regular management of Upper and Lower Lakes includes maintenance of the water control structures for effective function and continued monitoring of water levels.

00:28:27 Donatella

Evaluation of management is also carried out through surveys and monitoring of many marsh birds during breeding seasons. In the summer. You can find the link to more information on the drawdown and the overall management of upper and lower lakes at the associated web page for this podcast.

00:28:44 Liz

So we learned that wetlands aren't important for filtration and for water quality. However, someone who spends a lot of time around wetlands in the summer might know him for something else they provide, mosquitoes.

00:28:57 Liz

Mosquitoes breed in standing water, including many wetlands. Mosquitoes are also vectors of disease, including triple E or Eastern Equine Encephalitis and West Nile virus, or WNV. Both of these viruses, primary reservoir is birds, so the disease is spread by bird specific mosquitoes.

00:29:18 Tom Langen

The mosquito that's associated with one of the that's associated with spreading WNV in Tripoli is associated with cedar swamps and maple swamps, which we have a lot of up here. And So what happens is, you know it's this reservoir of the birds.

00:29:39 Tom Langen

It's primarily vector is this mosquito? But then there are other mosquitoes that also bite birds, and they bite horses and they bite people, and so as it becomes more common, it moves to can be spread to people and horses.

00:30:01 Tom Langen

We’re dead ends. We're not really reservoirs for it, we get. The virus doesn't do well on us and it doesn't transfer from human to human. It doesn't become an epidemic. But it certainly can be a health hazard, especially for people who are immunocompromized.

00:30:17 Liz

Considering the risk that mosquitoes pose to public health, here's some recommendations for mitigating this issue.

00:30:25 Tom Langen

The bottom line is you want to do what you can to discourage the mosquitoes that bite humans.

00:30:31

Mm.

00:30:32 Tom Langen

And many of those that are the ones that take them from the birds to us are not mosquitoes that breed in, like flower pots and standing water in your yard and so forth.

00:30:41 Donatella

Yeah.

00:30:42 Tom Langen

So getting rid of those water sources that are attractive to them, and then avoiding being active when mosquitoes are active, especially at dusk, because it really, they’re looking to feed get their feed right there, it is the best thing you can do.

00:31:00 Liz

With like top down control, like maybe having more like bat boxes to increase bat population. Could that also be effective?

00:31:07 Tom Langen

Yeah, I mean that's, you know that that's that couldn't hurt and it might help. I mean, bats eat a tremendous amount of mosquitoes and so attracting those near your home is a good thing. So mosquitoes swallows, chimney swifts, all those things that are aerial predators that feed on small flying insects are good to have, and should be encouraged.

00:31:31 Liz

Yeah.

00:31:32 Tom Langen

You know, a lot of people say, well, maybe we should just be spraying all the wetlands. The reality is that we have so much wetland. First of all, there's a lot of negative environmental impacts of doing that.

00:31:42 Liz

Yeah.

00:31:44 Tom Langen

It's also we have so many. I mean, we cannot afford to do that even if we wanted to.

00:31:52 Liz

Yeah.

00:31:53 Tom Langen

So there may be a place for mosquito control, chemical mosquito control near areas where there's the greatest risk of infected mosquitoes biting. So maybe some swamps near you know, places where there are horses and people. That's something that we're interested in doing some research on is if we can pinpoint places where you know, taking more action is warranted because we don't think it's not warranted on the level of the whole landscape. Do that and it would be the negative environmental effects of that would be.

00:32:32 Liz

Yeah, for sure.

00:32:39 Liz

Throughout this podcast, we've discussed a lot about wetlands and their management. Hopefully you have a sense of just how important wetlands are for the ecosystem, with services and water management and filtration, pollutant detoxification or sequestration and habitat for diversity of species.

00:32:56 Liz

Managing wetlands is a multifaceted process. Evaluations can be done to rank the wetland quality using tools such as GIS, surveys, and studying indicator species.Using this information, a plan can be established and carried out. After that, the cycle often repeats with comparisons made between wetlands, reevaluations of wetlands, for example, areas of concern that are being restored and assessments of value by the wetland.

00:33:24 Liz

Key considerations when restoring or managing a wetlands may include boosting soil microbes and establishing native plants. Creating or removing water control mechanisms to allow for water fluctuation. Creating buffer zones, removing invasive species and dealing with nutrient runoff.

00:33:41 Liz

It's important to recognize that quality and management is often unique to the wetland, considering its type and the surrounding area. North Country wetlands are numerous, but they face threats from large agricultural runoff and development, as well as road salt. Long term management is incredibly important to preserve these critical ecosystems for years to come.