Nonpoint Pollution | Success Stories | Wetland and Riparian

Wetland and Riparian Area Success Stories

Note: Highlighted projects are not necessarily funded by the Coastal Nonpoint Program nor do they necessarily represent projects that have been approved by NOAA and EPA to remove remaining conditions on state programs.

PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Ecological Corridors Protect Wildlife Movement and Water Quality in Michigan: Michigan's Coastal Management Program is continuing its long-standing support of Wild Link, a project to counter the impacts of habitat fragmentation in the northwestern Lower Peninsula. The forests, clear lakes, and trout streams of the five-county Grand Traverse Bay watershed are home to black bear, bobcat, otter, deer, and other wildlife. Increasingly, they are also the setting of housing developments, including second homes for retirees and vacationers seeking to be close to nature. Cleared lands and new developments block or complicate the movements of wildlife as they search for food, mates, and shelter. Through the Wild Link project, the Conservation Resource Alliance (CRA) helps private property owners establish, manage, and protect corridors of wildlife habitat that join large expanses of forests and wetlands under public ownership. Landowners participate in Wild Link because they view the presence of wildlife as a tangible benefit to owning property "up north," and readily grasp the concept of habitat corridors. Corridors suitable for black bear and other widely-roaming species are hundreds of feet in width. Consequently, many participating landowners set aside and maintain and/or re-vegetate considerable amounts of acreage for wildlife.

Most of the private lands mapped and targeted by the CRA for landowner contact and ecological corridor establishment are riparian lands or wetlands. Protecting wide bands of natural vegetation along rivers, streams, and adjacent uplands has obvious water quality benefits and is directly aligned with a number of Coastal Nonpoint Program management measures. Though wildlife protection is the main "hook" for drawing landowners to participate in Wild Link, CRA biologists consider water quality objectives when developing property-specific management plans. This year, the Michigan Coastal Management Program is awarding the CRA a 6217 grant to complete habitat restoration plans for approximately 750 acres of priority ecological corridors.

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Southern California Implements Wetlands Recovery Project:Like many urbanized and developing areas, Southern California has witnessed a 70-75% loss of coastal wetlands. Past efforts to acquire, restore and enhance the region's remaining wetlands were disjointed and piecemeal. Southern California lacked a regional approach to wetlands protection and restoration that recognized the important interrelationships among the areas wetlands. Therefore, in 1997 the State formed the Southern California Wetlands Recovery Project to bring together 17 state and federal agencies to work in a coordinated effort with local governments, businesses, and the environmental community to protect and restore wetlands and watersheds in the Region. The Wetlands Project has developed a regional restoration plan and each year, develops a list of priority projects to undertake.

The State provided the initial funding for the Wetlands Project but the Project has since developed a strategy to secure $200 million in additional support from federal, state, local and private sources over the next 10 years. The Wetlands Project uses the money to support priority projects in four major areas: acquisition, wetlands restoration, restoration planning and design, and restoration of the ecological function of coastal watersheds such as projects that stabilize shorelines or restore natural drainage patterns. The Project also runs a small grants program to fund community-based restoration projects. As of June 2003, 75 projects totaling almost $70M have been supported through state, federal, local, and private funds.

To aid their restoration efforts, the Wetlands Project has also developed an interactive, web-based GIS mapping program that shows where restoration projects are located and provides detailed summaries about each restoration project, wetland and watershed. In addition, the advance mapping function allows the user to select from over 20 data layers and view, query, buffer and measure features within the data layers.

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