A Paleoecological Perspective on Wetland Restoration

Abstract

Paleoecological investigations of wetland sedimentary deposits offer the possibility of obtaining accurate reconstructions of base line conditions in the past. Plant remains, such as leaves, seeds, fruits, wood, and pollen, provide a window of variable temporal and spatial resolution into past environmental conditions at a particular site. These archives of physical and biological wetland ecosystem characteristics, if preserved, may be exploited to reconstruct the plant community at a single point in time. Moreover, changes in past plant community composition, hydrology, and the dynamics of wetland ecosystems through time may be better understood. This paper reviews the range of paleoecological information archived in wetland sedimentary deposits that may be understood in the restoration science context. This type of information gleaned by applying paleoecological techniques should provide reasonable targets for restoration ecologists working to improve the quality and quantity of ecosystem functions and services in wetlands.Undisturbed wetlands, by virtue of their position on the landscape and the specific properties of the plants that populate these ecosystems, archive proxies of past environmental information within their soils and sediments. In temperate North America the geomorphic settings for wetlands typically vary from locale to locale, including depressional, riverine or floodplain, and lacustrine, among others. Yet all wetlands share a common attribute; the inundation of soil by water at a duration or frequency that is sufficient to exclude flora and fauna intolerant of such conditions. Although this ecosystem trait provides wetland scientists a means to mechanistically define a wetland, from a paleoecological standpoint there is a more important consequence of hydric soil conditions; plant and animal remains are often preserved in the wet, oxygen-deficient soils. Moreover, most wetlands are depositional environments; places where sediment accumulation exceeds erosion, thereby providing B. A. LePage (ed.), Wetlands,

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“…Our results underscore the benefits of including a palaeoecological perspective in developing strategies for the conservation, management and restoration of C‐rich peatlands (Vasander et al. 2003; Williams 2011), reaffirm the value of upland buffers along wetland margins and highlight the potential sensitivity of these systems to past and future changes in usage of the surrounding landscape.…”

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“…; Lyman and Cannon ; Hayashida ; National Research Council ; Willis and Birks ; Dietl and Flessa , ; Smol ; Hoeksema et al . ; Williams ; Willis and MacDonald ; Brewer et al . ; Conservation Paleobiology Workshop ; Louys ).…”

Pampa Plain (Argentina) Wetland History through a Lake Case Study: Kakel Huincul Environmental History during the Last 600 Years

“…The sedimentary record can be thought of as an archive of monitoring data collected over centuries and millennia (Bunting and Whitehouse 2008), which may be analyzed to reconstruct changes in hydrology and in biological community composition and dynamics through time. This information is valuable to those who are interested in studying the ecological dynamics of the past and to those who have more applied goals, such as wetland creation, enhancement, and restoration (Williams 2011). Effective conservation requires both, a detailed knowledge of the ecology of the concerned biota including the development of habitats and ecosystems through time, and how species have responded to environmental and anthropogenic changes.…”

“…Effective conservation requires both, a detailed knowledge of the ecology of the concerned biota including the development of habitats and ecosystems through time, and how species have responded to environmental and anthropogenic changes. For the restoration design of some ecosystems, it is also desirable to have adequate knowledge of the pre-disturbance conditions as a starting point (Williams 2011). These conditions are those present in the absence of anthropogenic in uence, also termed as baseline or reference conditions (Davies and Bunting 2010).…”