The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service has released an interesting, but very circumspect, report on the “Status and Trends of Wetlands in the Conterminous United States 2004 to 2009.” It explicitly does “not draw conclusions regarding trends in the quality or condition of the Nation’s wetlands” and only provides data on “wetland extent and type.” The report has no state-by-state tabulations and is very cautious about attributing particular causes for wetland losses. Nonetheless, the report does have much interesting information. For example,
- Overall national wetland losses have steadily declined nationally from 458,000 acres per year in the early 1950s to 13,800 acres per year recently.
- “In a five year period, we lost over 630,000 acres of forested wetlands, mostly in the Southeast – an area equal to half a million football fields each year” (F&WS Director Dan Ashe). The report says that silvicultural activities were a prime cause of this loss.
Neither the federal nor the state government maintains an accurate ongoing tabulation of wetlands in Florida. There are only reports on the estimated effects of wetland permits. However, many wetlands are lost or degraded outside of any permitting scheme. Wouldn’t it be nice to know the real “status and trends” of wetlands in Florida?
Hi Tom:
I wrote a historical account of wetlands inventories in Florida since 1850 a few years ago. It is a book chapter entitled “Water, Water Everywhere” and it appears in the edited volume by Jack Davis and Ray Arsenault entitled Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida (2005. University Press of Florida. pp. 113-137). As you noted, what records we do have are widely scattered.
As it happens, the National Status and Trends report is based only on a significant sample from around the country (there has never been nearly enough money for a true “census of wetlands”). This sample contains several plots in Florida (more in Fla. than in most states), so they have been able to make some generalizations about all of Florida (NOT county by county) based on the relatively large amount of sampling in Florida. The last Fla. report was published in 2005 and it covers the period 1985-1996. Thomas E. Dahl. 2005. Florida’s Wetlands: An Update on Status and Trends, 1985-1996. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. 80 pp. (available as a pdf: http://www.fws.gov/wetlands/StatusAndTrends/index.html). When President Bush called upon the Fish and Wildlife Service to produce National Status and Trends reports every five years (instead of every ten), I think this meant that Fish and Wildlife people had less time to produce Florida reports from the national data–so we have no more recent report on Florida.
Although we appear to have reduced wetland losses around the country, it seems to me that part of the reason this is so is because there are far fewer wetlands left to drain! Meanwhile, the creation (and counting) of golf course water hazards and fenced water retention ponds (as mitigation for natural wetland destruction) also contributes to the perception that we have greatly reduced wetland destruction in Florida and elsewhere.