(bright cheerful music) - Welcome to "At Issue."

I'm H Wayne Wilson.

Thank you as always for joining us.

This time we're going to be talking about wetlands lots of different wetlands.

You may be fam familiar with terms like marsh and bogs and things of that nature.

There's also more technical terms, riverine marshes, there's palustrine marshes.

We're gonna talk a little bit about names, but, more importantly, we're going to be talking about the importance of bringing back wetlands, what they mean, not only to Mother Nature, but to you as an individual.

And we're going to have that conversation first with Jill Kostel.

Jill is with the Wetlands Initiative where she is senior environmental engineer.

Thank you for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

- Mike Miller is here.

Mike returns to the table but this time in a different role.

In the past, we've known Mike as working at the Peoria Park District.

He is now retired but that doesn't mean he's left the industry of watching Mother Nature.

He is the president of the Peoria Wilds board.

Mike, thanks for being back with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- And also with this Maria Lemke.

Maria is with the Nature Conservancy where she is the conservation science director.

Thank you for being with us.

- Pleasure.

- And I threw out some words.

Marsh, we know, bog we know, but if I could start with you, Jill.

Well, what is a wetland?

And I know there are different kinds but is there a generic way of describing a wetland?

- Yeah, I think a wetland is anywhere where you have the interface of water and land.

And through that interface, you develop certain soil and plant species, you know, soil characteristics and based, you know, 'cause the soil has been saturated.

And sometimes the water's aboveground, sometimes you don't see the water in the wetland, but based on those water conditions in the soils you have certain species of plants that grow in those type of environments.

They've been adapted to grow in those environments.

So you can go anywhere, as you mentioned, a bog to a marsh, to a wet prairie, all different types of wetlands.

- And I mentioned a few technical terms and I don't want to get bogged down, and excuse the term with that, but there is, the one we wanna talk about a lot is riverine wetland.

Not surprisingly, that's one that's connected to a river in some way.

And then there's the palustrine, which is an inland one.

It's still a wetland, but it has more hardwood forests.

And the one I find, estuary, everybody knows that word, and that would be where saltwater and freshwater are coming in.

So can you further elucidate on what all of this means?

I mean, when we talk about a, there's hardwood in a wetland, there is a wet prairie, as Joe mentioned.

- Yeah.

I think one of the things, depending if you look at the environmental factors that drive your wetland.

In the Illinois River Valley, obviously, the flood pulse of the river is going to be one of the major drivers of how wetlands operate.

When do they dry out, when are they their highest water state?

And and so, you know, I think in our systems a lot is dictated by, you know, the flood pulse of the Illinois River.

So our rivering systems are key in that.

Kind of further up the chain of water flow.

You have isolated wetlands or wetlands that might feed creeks and streams that affect the Illinois River.

And so the whole flood pulse of the river has changed in the last, you know, 200 years as the river becomes more of a managed system for shipping and navigating that affects how those wetlands you know, operate in our modern culture.

- And I wanna talk more about that with Maria in just a second, but wetlands don't have to be wet all the time.

- Correct.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of wetlands are very ephemeral in nature.

They will, you know, dry up during the driest part of the year.

Even wetlands that are directly tied to the river do have low times, do have dry times.

And that's an important part of the ecology of those wetlands.

So it's a crucial that wetlands kind of follow that cycle.

- Maria, Mike mentioned that there's been change in the Illinois River.

We've put dams in, there's navigation.

So more than a hundred years ago, we created levees.

I don't mean we, but farmers created levees.

How much of the Illinois River is still levied?

- Roughly 50% of the of the Illinois River valley area is levied off from the river, which means 50% of it's still connected, so.

- So with regard to that, that the river and sedimentation et cetera, has that dynamic, the relationship between the backwater wetlands and the river, has that changed in terms of, maybe the depth is different?

- Right.

Completely.

So the backwater areas that are levied off were levied off roughly a hundred years ago, 80, 100 years ago.

So they've been separated from the river for that long.

And the natural function of rivers and their floodplains is the river floods in there, a lot of sediment settles out and then the flood pulse that you mentioned earlier and then the river water goes back into the main channel.

And what happens when you levy off the river is that sedimentation doesn't happen anymore.

So now the river is higher than those backwater areas.

So you can't just take out a levy without creating a whole lot of flooding.

- The Nature Conservancy probably is known, in Central Illinois, best for Emiquon down in Fulton County.

That may be one of the larger wetlands especially in with relationship to the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife property that's adjacent to it across the river.

How did that come about?

And I don't need a history lesson, but I mean, that was farmed land and it also had cattle on it for 80, 90 years.

- Mm-hmm.

- How did you go about making sure that return to a wetland and how well has it worked?

- I'll start with your last question.

It's worked really well.

- Historically- - Well, we got that out of the way.

(Maria laughs) Okay.

- Okay.

No, it, so historically, you know, that was a huge, it was a backwater lake, Thompson Lake and Flag Lake, a couple of lakes.

It was connected to the Illinois River, was levied off from the river in 1920s or so and farmed, like you said, for about 80, 90 years.

There's a lot of great history there with a lot of science.

With Stephen Forbes and Charles Kofoid.

We have a lot, we have volumes of information from that particular site from a hundred years ago when they studied that when it was still connected to the river.

The Conservancy did acquire the land in 2000.

And with the idea of restoring it back to its historical kind of floodplain area, we kept it farmed for a few years to try to understand how best to restore it.

You know, what is that plan?

And 2007 just turned off the pumps and the water filled into those historic lake beds, Thompson and Flag.

So those lake beds were still there after all that farming.

So aquatic plants came in naturally.

There were some in the drainage ditches already but we didn't plant any aquatic plants.

A really diverse plant bed out there now and sits in really well.

- But because of the levy, that property was levied, you still have to have an outlet structure of some kind to manage the water level because of that change in depth of the river and the backwater.

- Correct, and there was a lot of discussion early on about how to restore that.

Should we take out the levee?

Should we just take out pieces of the levee?

It was, you know, and we worked with the state water survey to do a lot of hydrologic modeling to really understand how best to approach that.

And in the end, the best approach really was just putting in a water management structure that goes through the levy and allows us now, which was completed in 2016, so that allows us now to manage that water.

I mean, the water just kept filling up and filling up, and you, it really if you wanna mimic that historic flood pulse you really need to let water out and let it, you know, resettle, get some shallow water for all those plants and animals and things like that.

- Let me turn over to Mike about Peoria Wilds.

That may not be a group that is well known.

It does manage or volunteer the manage of the savanna that's at Springdale Cemetery in Peoria.

But with regard to wetlands, backwaters, et cetera, what's the role of Peoria Wilds?

- Well, I think when we're going through a kind of conservation planning process now, and you know, what wetland, what is the need to start with from a conservation standpoint for an organization like ours?

What role can we play?

You know, we have the Nature Conservancy, we have Illinois Audubon, which are kind of like statewide land trusts.

Central Illinois kind of needs maybe a homegrown organization to kind of, you know, work with homeowners, work with landowners to develop conservation practices on their land and have a method for them to preserve that land and protect it into the future through either conservation easements or getting them involved with local agricultural programs.

So that's the role that we look to play is to be a maybe smaller in scale, not to build an Emiquon, but to help somebody with a a 15-acre wetland on their farm.

- Well, let's turn our attention, Jill, to that concept.

He mentioned 15 acres, I think Emiquon is 6,700 or somewhere in that range.

But if you own a piece of farmland, maybe as small as 10 acres or so, can you do something that will have a significance along the Illinois River with regard to bringing back wildlife, fish, et cetera?

- Absolutely.

Any type of restoration, really, no matter the size is gonna start bringing back those wetland ecological processes and functions that provide us the services that we need and wildlife need.

So taking 10 acres of unproductive or non-profitable farmland out and restoring it or letting it come back to being a wetland provides water filtration.

We're able to improve water quality providing necessary habitat out there for all kinds of species.

Essentially, if you build a wetland, things will find it.

It also provides temporary water storage.

So if we start storing water upstream for these smaller events, then we don't have to worry about the larger pulses downstream in the river system.

So these little, you know, small, though maybe isolated wetlands, still play important role in there for migration and other aspects that, you know, we need for wildlife habitat, pollinator habitat.

So they're very important out there on the landscape.

- And let's explore that further because the plants in a wetland can absorb carbon, they can filter nutrients.

I mean, they serve multiple purposes that I don't think we stop and think about other than, well there's a bunch of water and a couple of reeds sticking up.

- Yeah they play a huge role in how we say, like they filter the water quality, the plants themselves are a structure and so they can slow the water down, let suspended particles in the water settle out.

But the main thing would be really, they're a carbon source, as you mentioned.

They are carbon and they, you know, decompose.

But what this carbon serves is for the microbes.

They're actually living in the sediment.

And these are the microbes that are processing the nitrate that we find in our water or our tile drainage water off of farms.

And these microbes then convert that nitrate into nitrogen gas, which is the majority of our atmosphere.

So they do this inherently.

And so we often design wetlands such that we try to optimize that process and plants and, you know, also use nutrients, but they senesce or they die and decompose, so.

But they are able to trap the phosphorus and sediment in there as well.

So the wetlands clean the water that way.

- I wanna talk about the Mackinaw River because it's a major tributary to the Illinois and the Franklin family still farms along the Mackinaw, but they decided that there were some areas where it would be beneficial to return that to a backwater, to some sort of a wetland.

How well has that worked?

- That has worked really well.

So we've worked with them to construct several kinds of wetlands on their property on one of their farms.

One series of wetlands we've used as experimental wetlands to monitor how well they take up the nitrogen and how well they retain the phosphorus.

And then their farm also is adjacent to the Mackinaw River.

And so down in that floodplain, we've actually worked with them to reinstall some floodplain wetlands which take in flood waters and retain that.

Those floodplain wetlands also capture all the surface water coming off their farm through the grass waterways, ends up in those floodplain wetlands as well rather than going directly into tributary systems.

So they've worked really well and they're still working 15 years later.

We're still doing some monitoring out there and they're still, you know, working just like they're designed to do.

And then Jill mentioned the wildlife, within weeks you have we have six species of frogs that live in these wetlands and, you know, birds that are nesting in the cattails and the vegetation that came up almost overnight.

So they're just amazing systems that not only help to, you know, treat and improve water quality that's going on into the Mackinaw River.

They slow down water that's going in the Mackinaw River to reduce the instream erosion during these big rain events and they create great habitat for wildlife.

- It occurs to me that farmers sometimes, especially in the early spring, sometimes in the fall, we see farmers putting in tiles, drainage tiles, and that moves water off and it necessarily causes some problems.

Can we talk about, and I don't know who best wants to address this, but the issue of you can actually put structures in place tiling farm land is good idea.

You don't want a soggy farm field.

But how do you best control that instead of having it dumped straight into the ravine, the stream, the river?

- Yeah, more and more tile is going in and has been in and to make, you know, planting and harvest easier.

Corn doesn't like to grow in water, but a lot of it is going now as part of a risk mitigation.

As with the changing climate we're getting more and more intense rainfall.

So tile is going in.

But the ways they can manage that tile water through a controlled drainage, they can put in water control structures that will allow them maybe to keep the water in the field for part of the year during the fall or spring migration time.

And then prior to planting, release the water out of the fields through the water control structures and drain it back down such that they can get in there with the equipment and plant and farm as usual.

They can also treat the tile water before it leaves their field using, you know, constructive wetlands that we talked about, saturated buffers, woodchip denitrifying bioreactors.

So there's a lot of things that farmers can do to both keep water on their field as well as treat the water before it leaves their field.

- There's, I assume it's still there, the Detweiller project?

- Mm-hmm.

- How well is that working?

- So that's a good example of, you know, you know, the Detweiller project used to be a golf course that was closed down and then it was one of those situations where, all of a sudden, we had a large cross section of the Illinois River from obviously river shore up to kind of more of a mesic upland, a woods.

And so we can kind of recreate or restore that area of the flood pulse.

If you think about it, when it was a golf course the river would flood and then we would go back in and clean everything and kind of push it back in the river, you know, get it away.

And, and so we really truncated the swath of habitat that was available and by restoring that and allowing that flood pulse to do its thing from a, you know, a normal base level up to a 26' flood level, you know, we're seeing species come in there.

It's like, "Oh, there's boltonia decurrens, we didn't plant it."

It was there kind of eeking out a survival, you know, and an existence.

And now it has room to grow.

And so we're seeing that areas that maybe there was just a few plants have now kind of taken off and moved across that landscape and sorted out where they like to grow the best.

So that's what watershed restoration along the Illinois River is, again, restoring that pulse.

- And we probably should point out that in many cases much of the plant life such as at Emiquon, was seeds that were dormant for 80, 90 years.

And it just amazes me that... - It is amazing.

And so we saw that at Emiquon at a really large scale.

You know, it was farmed for 80 years or more and there were some agricultural ditches so there were some plants in the ditches already.

But yes, the seeds, the plants, they must have been dormant in the soils, coming in with wildlife on their fur, their, you know, feathers and aerial too, but.

Another thing we've seen too with these little small wetlands, like in the Mackinaw, they can be less than an acre large.

And we still see a vegetation coming up in these plants, really nice native species coming up most of the time.

And they're, I just think they're laying dormant in the soils for 80 years waiting to be rewed.

You know, historically it was marshy habitat all through there.

So it's kind of restoring that landscape function and habitat and like Jill mentioned, you know, the wildlife and the plants just find it almost immediately.

- We have some video to show that, this is from the Wetlands Initiative.

And if you could, Jill, explain what we're seeing here.

This is Livingston County to begin with.

- Yeah, this is just an example of the tile treatment wetlands that we design and install on working farms here in Illinois in several counties through our program, which we call Smart wetlands.

Not that different from what the Nature Conservancy has done in the Mackinaw.

These wetlands are designed to intercept and capture the tile drainage water before it hits the downstream creek or a ditch.

That way we allow those natural processes to remove the nitrate and capture the phosphors coming out of the system.

They're all different shapes and sizes.

We work with the farmers, you know, "How does this fit in your operations?"

These are not restored wetlands.

These are specifically designed and located to intercept the tile water.

But as you can see here, we get the native vegetation right away.

Sometimes we seed it, sometimes we plant it, sometimes we rely on that natural seed bank that is present there.

Nice thing is these, as we mentioned, they move 50 to 90% of the nitrate in the tile water, up to 30% of the phosphorus that is coming in there.

So the robust little tiny engines, you know, they do a lot of work in the small spaces.

The wetlands that were shown there are on average about an acre in size.

So the total land out of production with the buffer is four to five acres.

And like I said, you know, we design 'em with the farmer, "How does it fit in your operation?"

But it's a great use of marginal or non-profitable farmland.

You can actually probably increase your profitability if you take those acres out of farming and put 'em into a conservation program such as a restored or constructed wetland.

- Mike, Jill mentioned, with Emiquon, that was just restoring what already had been there, a restored wetland.

There's constructed wetlands as Jill alluded to.

Can a small property owner construct their own wetland?

What would it, I mean, how difficult might that be?

- Right.

If you think of our average lot size here in Peoria, you know, the amount of rainfall that hits your roof has to go somewhere.

And what happens to it is kind of your decision.

That water can come down the gutters and go out to the curb and be a part of this problem of, you know, our combined sewer overflow project or some of those wetlands can be, or some of that rainwater can be utilized as a resource, put back into the landscape either through rain barrels or or bioswales or a rain garden in people's backyard.

Anytime we can get water utilized by plants, magic happens.

And that's part of, you know, whether it's a pollinator garden or putting native species in that can, you know benefit native animals and pollinators.

I think, you know, that's an example of what anybody can do in their own backyard.

So there's a lot that can be done.

Farmers who might have 20 acres could manufacturer a constructed wetland project.

- So from what I hear you could have a bioswale, very small in your backyard, that actually is a wetland.

- Sure.

- Because I think when we think wetland, we think about this expanse of water with big bluestem and decurrent aster and et cetera.

What would you say to a landowner, a homeowner, to encourage them to say, "Maybe I could do a little bit more for the environment?"

- To encourage them, well, I would just take a look at what their landscape looks like and maybe show them some of these sites that we're talking about today.

I know some of the experiences I've had with farmers in the last few years, (chuckles) few decades, is actually showing them like what some of these wetlands look like.

Because visualizing it is one of the first steps of understanding what it could look like in your own backyard or in your farmland and acreage.

And I do think people, when you say wetlands, they think of these big gigantic, you know, cypress swamps or you know, and things, mosquito, things like that.

But when you show these small kind of constructive wetlands on the side of the field or some of these smaller bioswales or rain gardens, you know, then people can start envisioning how it looks like on their own property.

- And Jill, your thoughts on encouraging individuals to be a part of the solution?

- Yeah, I think everyone can, you know, retain some of their own water leaving their property.

I like the idea of rain gardens.

I like to think 'em as mini wet prairies.

You know, you get the right vegetation in with the deep roots, you can hold some of that water back.

But also just, you know, volunteering out there, working, maybe doing some invasive management, doing seed collection, plug planting, just being aware of the wetlands around them and going out there and appreciate them and realizing that they're there and they're important.

- Mother Nature is resilient if given a chance.

- If given a chance.

Yes.

- With that, let me say thank you to my guests.

Well, I hope that we can continue the conversation at home and maybe look into taking care of a miniature wetland.

Thank you very much to Dr. Jill Kostel, who is with the Wetlands Initiative, also to Dr. Maria Lemke with the Nature Conservancy and to Mike Miller, he is the president of the board of Peoria Wilds.

Thank you to all three of you for the conversation.

We hope you will join us next time on "At Issue" when we'll be talking to the recently elected representative from the 17th Congressional District which represents a little bit of Rockford, a little bit of Peoria, and the Quad Cities area.

Eric Sorenson will join us on the next "At Issue."

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