Our vital wetlands

Dingo · Dec 10, 2013

I'm starting a thread on wetlands. Here is the first installment.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/12/09-5

The nation's coastal wetlands are being lost at a staggering rate, a recent report shows.

Wetlands, sometimes referred to as nature's "kidneys" for their ability to filter runoff, play an increasingly important role in the face of climate change because they can help buffer storm damage.

Yet from 2004-2009 wetland area in the coastal watersheds of the U.S. dropped by over 360,000 acres, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) detail in their report (pdf). That amounts to an annual loss of over 80,000 acres, a 25 percent-increase since the agencies' previous reporting period.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"While they comprise less than 10 percent of the nations land area, they support 75 percent of our migratory birds, nearly 80 percent of fish and shellfish, and almost half of our threatened and endangered species. We cant sustain native wildlife for future generations without protecting and restoring the coastal wetlands that support them," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe.
Click to expand...

smevins · Dec 11, 2013

If we are restoring wetlands, shouldn't Washington DC and New York lead by example and raze themselves to the ground?

Dingo · Dec 11, 2013

smevins said: ↑

If we are restoring wetlands, shouldn't Washington DC and New York lead by example and raze themselves to the ground?
Click to expand...

This is an environmental thread, not a Tea Party thread. Try to get with the program and stop trolling.

smevins · Dec 11, 2013

Dingo said: ↑

This is an environmental thread, not a Tea Party thread. Try to get with the program and stop trolling.
Click to expand...

So you only want to restore wetlands that are inconvenient to others? I am not trolling. It is a legitimate issue. If you do not own the wetlands, then there is no justification for taking one set as opposed to the other set. Given the challenges to the Chesapeake bay, restoring DC to a marsh to stop the onslaught of pollution and farm run off out of Maryland makes perfect sense. Move the Capitol to Wichita or somewheres.

Earthling · Dec 12, 2013

Dingo said: ↑

This is an environmental thread, not a Tea Party thread. Try to get with the program and stop trolling.
Click to expand...

No comment.

Dingo said: ↑

I know it's fun to play hall monitor ...
Click to expand...

waltky · Feb 1, 2017

Granny says, "Dat's right - wildlife returns with wetlands too...

Study: Restoring Wetlands Could Help Fix Climate Change
February 01, 2017 When it comes to climate change, there are all kinds of ideas about how to address the problem.

One that has been on the front burner lately is the 'engineering' approach. The idea is: humans can 'fix' the problem through technology, rather than by punishing people and industries that pump carbon into the atmosphere. Supporting clean energy technologies, and making them as cheap and plentiful as fossil fuels, is one way to engineer our way out of the problem. But according to a new report, protecting and rebuilding some of our coastal wetlands may be another way to get some carbon out of the atmosphere.

Wetlands as carbon sinks

The new study was done by researchers from the University of Maryland, with support from NOAA, and appears in the Journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The goal was to find the world's best 'blue carbon' storage sites. Blue carbon is what scientists call the carbon dioxide captured and held in the world's oceans and coastal systems. VOA spoke with lead author Ariana Sutton-Grier, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Maryland, about the research. She says one of the main points is that the natural world has already figured out some effective ways to deal with excess carbon. "Coastal wetlands are some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet," she points out, "and they store a lot of carbon below ground."

Salt marshes capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

How much? "The researchers estimated that mangrove forests in the U.S. capture and store as much as 34 metric tons of carbon annually," the team said in a press release. "Which is roughly equivalent to the carbon emitted by 24 million passenger cars in a year." And that's just the U.S. How about the world? Including the United States, they estimate "coastal wetlands may capture and store more than 200 metric tons of carbon per year globally."

Illustration of how coastal wetlands serve as reservoirs for carbon.

That's a lot of carbon, but Grier admits, not nearly enough to solve the problem. "This would definitely not be a "silver bullet" that would "fix" climate change;" she says. "There is no silver bullet. Human emissions are much larger than natural sinks, but with a problem this big, we need to find multiple solutions to reduce and combat emissions..." To give you an idea how big, some of the best estimates suggest humans are pumping about 36 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. To help reverse that trend means protecting, and perhaps beginning to restore the coastlines that have been degraded by human activity and rising sea levels.

Protecting, and rebuilding
Click to expand...

sawyer · Feb 2, 2017

Dingo said: ↑

This is an environmental thread, not a Tea Party thread. Try to get with the program and stop trolling.
Click to expand...

He has a point though. Why does the left always exclude itself from its own rules and regulations?

Log in or Sign up

Our vital wetlands

Dingo New Member

smevins New Member

Dingo New Member

smevins New Member

Earthling New Member

waltky Well-Known Member

sawyer Well-Known Member Past Donor

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

Our vital wetlands

Dingo New Member

smevins New Member

Dingo New Member

smevins New Member

Earthling New Member

waltky Well-Known Member

sawyer Well-Known Member Past Donor

Share This Page

Useful Searches