Module 5 - Wetlands Flashcards
What are some beneficial wetland functions and processes?
Beneficial functions of wetlands include providing flood control and storage, improving water quality and hydrology, reducing eutrophication and nutrient overloading, providing carbon storage, and providing unique habitat to abundant wildlife and complex food webs, all of which have socioeconomic impacts on the surrounding communities (U.S. EPA, 2017).
What are three wetland attributes?
- At least periodically, the land supports predominantly hydrophytes
- The soil is predominantly hydric soil
- The substrate is subsoil and is saturated with water or covered by shallow water at some time during the growing season of each year.
How many wetland types are there?
A) 10
B) 20
C) 30
D) 40
B) 20
Name the five hierarchies of the Cowardin System approach.
1) Systems
2) Subsystems
3) Classes
4) Subclasses
5) Dominant types
What was Cowardin’s definition of wetlands?
Wetlands are lands transitional between terrestrial and aquatic systems where the water table is usually at or near the surface or the land is covered by water.
By the mid-1980s, it is estimated that ___ ___ of all the wetlands in the U.S. had been drained or filled for agriculture or development (United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service, 2014).
over half (54%)
What was the Clean Water Act of 1972?
It significantly reorganized and expanded the 1948 Federal Water Pollution Control Act, establishing the basic structure for regulating the discharge of pollutants into the waters of the United States, including wetlands, and regulating water quality standards for surface water (U.S. EPA, 2015). The Clean Water Act focused on wetlands that were not on agricultural land.
What was the focus of the Food Security Act of 1985?
Food Security Act focused on wetlands that were on agricultural land (Vepraskas et al., 2016). The Food Security Act contained the 1985 Farm Bill, also known as the “swampbuster” provision, which denied United States Department of Agriculture program benefits, such as price-support loans, purchases, payments, farm storage facility loans, federal crop insurance, and disaster payments, to producers that converted wetlands into cropland after December 23, 1985 (Vepraskas et al., 2016)
The Corps of Engineers developed a Wetlands Protection Manual that required for jurisdictional wetlands to be identified using a “three-parameter approach” (Vepraskas et al., 2016). What were the three parameters?
The Manual recognized the three-parameter approach as the interaction of hydrology, vegetation, and soil, which result in the development of characteristics unique to wetlands (Environmental Laboratory, 1987).
Consistent with the three-parameter approach outlined in the 1987 Manual and subsequent Regional Supplements, an area must contain evidence of hydrophytic vegetation, hydric soil, and wetland hydrology to be determined a jurisdictional wetland, with the exception of special circumstances or problematic areas outlined in the Regional Supplements.
True
What is Hydrophytic Vegetation?
The community of macrophytes occurs in areas where inundation or soil saturation is either permanent or of sufficient frequency and duration to influence plant occurrence.
What is Hydric Soil?
Soil that formed under conditions of saturation, flooding, or ponding long enough during the growing season to develop anaerobic conditions in the upper part.
What is Wetland Hydrology?
Areas with evident characteristics of wetland hydrology are those in which the presence of water has an overriding influence on vegetation and soils caused by anaerobic and reducing conditions.
What is compensatory mitigation?
The restoration, establishment, enhancement, or in certain circumstances preservation of aquatic resources for the purposes of offsetting unavoidable adverse impacts to waters of the United States authorized by Department of Army permits which remain after all appropriate and practicable avoidance and minimization has been achieved.
What are common methods for monitoring vegetation?
They include randomly establishing permanent plots or transects to be assessed annually for vegetative density and species diversity, and are considered representative of the site as a whole.
