Peter, Paul, and Mary could very easily have been talking about our country’s wetlands instead of flowers in their 1962 hit, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” When wetlands were first forming, thousands of years ago as the ice age ended, the United States was 90% covered with wetlands. Today, coastal and inland wetlands cover only about 5.5% of the United States.
The Ramsar Convention estimates that nearly 90 percent of all the world’s wetlands have disappeared since the 1700s, and those that remain are at risk of disappearing three times faster than forests. In 1989, Congress directed the Department of the Interior to compare the estimated total number of wetland acres in the 1780s and in the 1980s in the areas that now comprise each state. The report, released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), was designed as a one-time effort to document historical wetland losses from colonial times through the 1980s. This report is updated every 10 years providing new information based on a statistical analysis of wetlands changes from the 1970s through the 1980s.
As with historical estimates, data on present wetland acreage must be interpreted with caution. For some states, wetlands have been mapped for the entire state by the FWS National Wetlands Inventory. However, for those states where wetlands are not completely mapped or where acreage summaries are not yet compiled, an accurate accounting of wetland acreage is not always available, so the best national or regional data available to determine statewide totals was used. Additionally, the status of wetlands in the United States is constantly changing. It is estimated that, on average , over 60 acres of wetlands have been lost every hour in the lower 48 states during this 200-year time span.
Considerable changes in wetland distribution and abundance have taken place since the 1780s. In the conterminous United States, only an estimated 104 million acres of wetlands remained through the 1980s, representing a 53-percent loss from the original acreage total. If Alaska and Hawaii are counted, an estimated 274 million wetland acres remain.
By all estimates, the national decline in wetlands from the 1780s to the 1980s is dramatic. Losses in particular regions of the country such as the mid-western farm belt states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin are even more startling. Alaska stands alone as the only state in which wetland resources have not been substantially reduced.
Incomplete baseline data on the wetlands in the United States prevents an accurate appraisal of the “health” of these remaining resources. However, population growth and distribution and agricultural development greatly affect land-use patterns that impact wetlands . Despite increased efforts to conserve wetlands through state and federal legislation, hundreds of thousands of acres have been drained annually. Wetland acreage has diminished to the point where environmental and even socio-economic benefits are now seriously threatened.
The years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s were a time of major wetland loss, but since then the rate of loss has decreased. How will climate change and global warming affect wetlands as our country and the rest of the world continue to experience unprecedented heat waves. The fact that the definition of a wetland changes often makes these numbers even harder to predict. The total amount of wetlands can change in an instant depending on the wording of a government document.
Various factors have contributed to the decline in the loss rate of wetlands including implementation and enforcement of wetland protection measures and elimination of some incentives for wetland drainage. Public education and outreach about the value and functions of wetlands, private land initiatives, coastal monitoring and protection programs, and wetland restoration and creation actions have also helped reduce overall wetland losses. Hopefully, this will be enough.
References:
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov › 2004/04
The Wetlands Initiative; Founded, 1994, http://www.wetlands-initiative.org/
How the U.S. Protects the Environment, From Nixon to Trump By Robinson Meyer
Dahl, T.E. and C.E. Johnson . 1991. Status and Trends of Wetlands in the
Conterminous United States, Mid-1780’s to Mid-1980’s. U.S. Department of
the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, D.C.