PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 121: Freshwater Wetlands
Thursday, August 11, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 520 C, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Wetland restoration in urbanizing landscapes: Challenges and possible strategies.

Wu, X. Ben^*,1, Whisenant, Steve¹, Simmons, Matthew¹, Rho, Paikho², ¹ Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA² Korea Environment Institute, Seoul, Korea

ABSTRACT- Urban and suburban areas are rapidly expanding and human population is increasingly concentrated in these areas with substantially reduced or impaired wetlands and riparian areas. There is a great need and increasing demand for ecological services of wetlands and riparian systems, such as water quality improvement, flood abatement, wildlife habitat and biodiversity support, as well as opportunities for recreation and environmental education in urbanizing landscapes. Wetland and riparian restoration in urbanizing landscape, however, are challenging because urbanization process has fundamentally, and often irreversibly, altered the landscape structure as well as the hydrological and ecological processes in these landscapes. Strategies need to be developed to restore and maintain ecological functions of wetlands under these novel settings and the conceptual basis of reference criteria for evaluating the success of wetland restoration in these landscapes need to be re-examined. In this study, we reviewed the challenges of wetland and riparian restoration in urbanizing landscapes and explored possible restoration strategies and reference criteria in a landscape ecological context. A case study of a bottomland forest wetland complex restoration in the Dallas metropolitan area was presented to illustrate the challenges and potential ecosystem- and landscape-scale strategies of wetland restoration in urbanizing landscapes.

Key words: wetland and riparian restoration, urbanizing landscape, restoration strategies, reference criteria