Midwest Wetlands Restoration Boosts Biodiversity and Water Quality

IMAGE: Steven D. Bailey

In April, Katie Kucera looks for blooming marsh marigolds and Virginia bluebells while listening for leopard frog growls.

“I love experiencing the wetlands awakening in spring,” says Kucera, an ecologist for The Wetlands Initiative (TWI), a Chicago-based nonprofit (Wetlands-Initiative.org).

These natural experiences, along with the role wetlands play in helping humans and wildlife, inspire Kucera and other TWI professionals to restore wetlands in the Chicago region, including at Lake Calumet and Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. TWI’s crowning achievement is the conversion of thousands of acres of farmland into a high-quality wetland natural area called the Dixon Waterfowl Refuge, where rare plants and animals now live. 

“Wetlands in the great flat Midwest are essential to the landscape,” says Paul Botts, TWI executive director and president. For one, like trees, wetlands can store carbon and help mitigate climate change. A recent TWI study showed that soil in newly restored wetlands had increased concentrations of carbon compared with agricultural soils. The researchers estimated that by 2040, the wetlands would be storing nearly 10 times more carbon due to accumulated vegetation and soils.

The Wetlands Initiative staff monitors plant diversity at a Smart Wetland adjacent to an agricultural field. Photo by Jean McGuire/TWI

“Wetlands are also nature’s sponges,” Botts says. “They filter out pollutants and prevent flooding. They also are hotspots of biodiversity. People tend to feel that they are also very beautiful.”

While prairies have been hailed for creating the rich soil that made farming so productive in the Midwest, wetlands also deserve credit.

“Since the last glaciers, we’ve had this flat, wide area in the center of our continent, with all these slow-moving rivers meandering, and that was building up this incredibly rich soil,” Botts explains. “Our natural heritage in the Midwest is very much a large product of wetlands.”

Chicago itself was once a huge wetland, but today, some 90 percent of the state’s wetlands are gone.

Mostly they were drained, filled in or redirected by installing tiles to make way for farmland. Over the years, this led to more pollution, increased flooding, and the disappearance of native plants and animals that rely on wetlands for survival.  

“These are the impacts we are trying to undo,” Botts says.

“A wetland is not simply a place that is wet or a place that has become wet,” he continues. “To be called a wetland, the place needs to be wet regularly all the time or part of the time for many years. It’s not a place that got wet in yesterday’s rainstorm. We classify wetlands when we find plants, animals, microbes and macroinvertebrates that are living there due to the conditions.”

“Wetlands contain hydric soils, which stay in place for a long time, even after they’ve been drained,” he says. “State hydric soil maps show where wetlands existed historically, and there are many all over much of the state.” These include places where seeps, bogs, marshes, swamps, wet prairies and sedge meadows—all types of wetlands—once thrived. 

The Wetlands Initiative was incorporated in 1994 by ecologist and environmental engineer Donald Hey and conservationist Al Pyott.

“It wasn’t an accidental pairing,” Botts says. “They realized if the Midwest is going to have lots of wetlands on its landscape, those beautiful sponges, then it will be about restoration, and that requires ecology and engineering.”

Volunteers plant wetland species at the Lake Calumet region.

The founders questioned whether a place that was once a wetland but had been flattened, drained and farmed for 80 years could be restored to its original high quality. It was a relatively new concept, and there were naysayers, but TWI proved it could be done with the flourishing of the 3,000-acre Sue and Wes Dixon Waterfowl Refuge, in Putnam County, a two-hour drive from Chicago and historically known as Hennepin and Hopper Lakes (Wetlands-Initiative.org/dixon-waterfowl-refuge-hh).

For most of the 20th century, the Illinois River backwater lakes and marshes—Hennepin and Hopper Lakes, in Putnam County, just south of the village of Hennepin—were drained to grow crops. In 2001, after acquiring the farmland from willing sellers, TWI turned off the drainage pumps and began restoration work. Where once only corn and soybeans grew, a mosaic of lakes, marshes, seeps, savannas and prairies now supports a wide range of native flora and fauna.

Pied-billed grebe and the state-endangered common gallinule nest in the high-quality wetlands. Various rare milkweeds also grow there, and rare butterflies like the great spangled fritillary feast on the blooms’ nectar. Today, more than 670 species of native plants, including some that are state-threatened or endangered, thrive at the refuge. Some were planted, while others emerged from a dormant seed bank. Forty-nine species of dragonflies and damselflies, and 62 species of butterflies have also been documented. The refuge was declared a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance in 2012, and roughly 40 percent of all bird species known in North America have been spotted there (Ramsar.org/about/our-mission/wetlands-international-importance).

A canoe travels through cattails and bulrushes at the Sue and Wes Dixon Waterfowl Refuge.

Since the establishment of the refuge, TWI has its breadth of projects in Illinois and Indiana, often collaborating with partners. One unique program, Smart Wetlands, helps absorb and treat specific pollutants from tile-drained farmland. 

“These wetlands are designed and placed specifically for the purpose of treating nitrate and collecting phosphate off the farm fields,” Botts explains. “The farmers are fully aware that the nitrate runoff harms waters far from their individual farms. The excess nutrients go into a ditch, then a small stream, and so forth, and we end up with degraded big rivers as well as waterbodies like the Great Lakes. It’s the biggest water quality issue of our time in the Midwest.”

TWI has installed six Smart Wetlands in Illinois, with more to come this year, provided that funding is available.

The organization is also working with partners to restore wetlands across the Calumet region, which spans southeastern Chicago and northwestern Indiana. Once a vast mosaic of wetlands and grasslands, the area was ditched and drained to make way for industry. Restoration efforts are creating intact, high-quality natural areas. Water control structures enable the conservation groups to mimic nature’s natural fluctuation of wetness. They also removed invasive species and planted native ones, improving conditions and giving native species a better chance to thrive.

Audubon Great Lakes (gl.Audubon.org) monitors sites in the Calumet region for 17 species of birds that require marshes for breeding. “Many of these species were declining, but now some of them have stabilized just from initial restoration work,” Botts says.  

TWI’s latest project is the 138-acre Square Marsh, situated next to a golf course at the north end of Lake Calumet.

“It’s been just brown water full of invasive carp for lots of decades,” Botts says. “No one living has ever seen Square Marsh as anything but a muddy mess with nothing native growing there.”

Botts promises those that see the marsh in a few years will be amazed at the plethora of animals and plants living there. 

Kucera says visiting a restored marsh renews the human spirit. “Many creatures need wetlands, and humans are some of those creatures,” she says. “These wetlands are essential to our quality of life. Being out in nature and close to water is really healing.”

Sheryl DeVore has written six books on science, health and nature, as well as nature, health and environment stories for national and regional publications. Read more at SherylDeVore.WordPress.com.