Scientists assess wetland health

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have developed new models designed to assess the health of wetlands that perform vital ecological functions in a watershed.

Smithsonian Institution researchers said the new wetland assessment method will help environmental managers quickly take stock of wetlands across an entire watershed.

Dennis Whigham, Donald Weller and Thomas Jordan of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and their colleagues conducted a large-scale study that combined field studies and remote-sensing data to assess the ecological functioning of wetlands in a landscape.

The researchers based their study on an approach previously developed for assessing individual sites, called the Hydrogeomorphic approach, in which ecological conditions are inferred from readily observable indicators, such as plant species present and the degree of human disturbance.

"We took these methods for assessing wetland functions and expanded them to a whole-landscape scale, which is something that has not been effectively done before," said Whigham, who coordinated the project. "These days, most land managers are not asking how to understand what is going on in an individual wetland, they want to manage resources at a much larger scale."

The study is presented in a special issue of the journal Wetlands.