The Nature Conservancy - Just Add Water

Go Deeper

The Nature Conservancy in Oregon
The Nature Conservancy owns or manages 46 nature preserves
and has helped protect over 494,000 acres of important habitat in Oregon.

Explosives Aid Wetland Restoration in Klamath Basin
See a video and slideshow of the blast!

The Conservnacy's Global Freshwater Team
The Conservancy is providing global leadership in environmental flow science and management.

Mitigation Banking and Nutrient Farming

Divining the nuances of wetland-restoration mechanics isn’t easy, but figuring out how to fund restoration projects can be just as tough. For many projects, the Conservancy has leveraged its funds with money from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund and from Farm Bill programs such as the Wetlands Reserve Program.

Another important source of funding comes from federal and state regulations that require land developers to mitigate or offset damage they cause to wetlands during construction.
Developers have traditionally offset wetland losses with man-made replacement wetlands on their own properties. But such replacements rarely provide the ecological benefits of those that have been restored.

“Wetland mitigation banks,” by contrast, allow multiple developers to pool their money to restore large-scale, high-quality wetlands. The Conservancy helped pioneer the wetland mitigation bank concept in 1992 when it created the Disney Wilderness Preserve, south of Orlando, Florida. The project has been funded by the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority and the Walt Disney World Corporation, which has so far provided about $41 million.

There the Conservancy bought and restored 11,500 acres of pine flats, oak scrub and wetlands that had been ditched and drained for cattle ranching and logging. The preserve’s managers first filled in the drainage ditches to prevent water from draining away. Then they reinforced two small earthen levees to help control water flows. “We actually engineered some water-control structures into those berms so we could manage the water to mimic natural processes,” says Conservancy scientist Monica Folk, who coordinates mitigation projects at the preserve.

The berms impound water and allow it to percolate into the underlying aquifer and surrounding lakes; from there, it moves on to the nearby Kissimmee River in a more natural slow-release pattern. The project got an almost-talismanic seal of approval in 1998, when an endangered Florida panther made his way out of the Everglades and appropriated the preserve as part of his territory.

The Conservancy has since created several other wetland mitigation banks and, in Mississippi, partnered with the state department of transportation to restore wetlands in order to mitigate others destroyed by highway projects. Still, land acquisition is an expensive business, and it’s getting more so—particularly in farm country, where the ethanol boom has pushed land prices up. “We paid $2,400 an acre for Emiquon [in 2000],” says Michael Reuter. “Now that land sells for over $5,000 an acre.”

Faced with spiraling land-acquisition costs, the Conservancy is exploring how environmentally friendlier practices might be woven into existing farming operations. On the Mackinaw River, a tributary of the Illinois River, the Conservancy is carrying out a pilot program to test the feasibility of “nutrient farming.” Conservancy staff have built micro-wetlands at the ends of farm fields to catch nutrient-laden water before it reaches the river (in the wetlands, many nutrients are either taken up by plants or metabolized by bacteria and then released into the air).

Nutrient farming could form the basis of a market modeled after an existing cap-and-trade system that has helped curb emissions of the pollutants that cause acid rain. Farmers could be paid for nitrogen and phosphorus they take out of the water with micro-wetlands, reducing the overall nutrient load flowing to the Gulf of Mexico.

Now Reuter and others are exploring additional ways for farmers to make money by doing right by the environment. The idea is for farmers to “stack” nutrient farming with other green income streams, including selling permits to hunt or fish on their property; growing switch grass and other crops for cellulosic ethanol, which could be more compatible with natural flood patterns and also provide wildlife habitat; and sequestering carbon by growing native plants to help fight global warming.

“These farmers know how to produce. They’re very good at it,” Reuter says. “If we can figure out a way for them to produce something that provides an economic return and environ-mental benefits, then it’ll just be a matter of getting out of their way.”

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