MAERC at Buck Island Ranch
300 Buck Island Ranch Road Lake Placid, Florida 33852 USA
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Wetland Restoration on Buck Island Ranch

USDA Wetland Reserve Program Sites

MacArthur Agro-ecology Research Center (MAERC)

Objectives | Restoration Sites | Plant Communities | Bayhead Restoration | Grazing Impacts | Soil Carbon Storage | Research Projects Home | MAERC Home 

Background

USDA Wetland Reserve Program.  The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Wetland Reserve Program (WRP) is a voluntary program offering landowners the opportunity to protect, restore, and enhance wetlands on their property.  The USDA provides technical and financial support to help landowners with their wetland restoration efforts.  The NRCS goal is to achieve the greatest wetland functions and values, along with optimum wildlife habitat.  

Permanent Conservation Easements and Restoration Plans for WRP Sites at MAERC.  MAERC staff  met with NRCS representatives in 1999 to explore options to apply for WRP site(s) at the Ranch. After consultation with the MacArthur Foundation MAERC submitted three potential sites to NRCS for consideration in 2000. In a regionally competitive ranking process, two sites on the Ranch, one in the East Marsh and one in the South Marsh, encompassing a total of approximately 750 acres, were approved for the WRP under the permanent easement option. The MacArthur Foundation entered into negotiations with USDA and established permanent conservation easements on these sites in 2002.  The scope of work and construction plans for the restoration were completed in 2007, and construction was completed in early 2008.  Tree planting on the bayhead site will take place in fall 2008. 

Evaluation of the restoration.  One limitation of USDA-NRCS conservation easement programs is lack of adequate resources to monitor the success or conservation or restoration programs.  Our interest in establishing WRP sites at MAERC was twofold:  1) initiate a research and monitoring program to evaluate the effectiveness of the restoration in terms of the explicitly stated goals of the WRP program, and 2) demonstrate the viability of such easements to other ranchers in the region and provide them with information of the land management and economic consequences of such an easement.  Seed funded to start the research and monitoring program was obtained through a generous gift from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to Archbold Biological Station. 

Objectives

1. restore and protect aquatic and associated upland habitats

2. enhance biological diversity

3. increase carbon storage

4. improve water quality

5. and assess impacts on sustainable economic performance of the Ranch

Research and Monitoring Approach

Restoration sites  [Top]

The WRP sites are on two locations at Buck Island Ranch: one in the East Marsh North, and one in the West 770 pasture.  The East Marsh site consists of a mosaic of native and semi-native communities including: depressional sawgrass and other herbaceous marshes, wet prairies, upland savanna, hardwood hammock, calcareous wetland ecotones, and a willow swamp.  The West 770 site consists of a mixture of wet prairie and bahia grass communities with a few scattered swamp trees.  This site was historically mostly a bayhead swamp community, but the swamp trees were removed at various stages during the period from 1940-1980.

Hydrologic Conditions

In the spring of 2003 we installed 19 instrumented ground water wells at various locations inside and adjacent to the two WRP sites to collect baseline data on hydrologic conditions prior to and after implementation of the hydrologic restoration.  The wells are 10 feet deep and are instrumented with small data logging pressure transducers for monitoring ground water levels as 6 hour intervals.

Wetland Plant Communities  [Top]

We have created a detailed plant community level digital vegetation map of the current wetland community types and their boundaries in each of the two wetland reserve sites, to enable us to test the effect of restoration on plant communities, particularly in transition zones occurring along hydrologic gradients.  Community boundaries are entered in ArcView as polygon shapefiles.  The resulting combined map serves as baseline qualitative spatially explicit data, as well as providing the basis for designing a vegetation sampling system stratified to more intensively sample the plant communities most likely to show change as a result of hydrologic restoration.

Plant communities were sampled in fall 2004 with a stratified sampling design based on sampling units of one square meter plots spaced along permanent linear transects of from 50 to 100 meters in length with sample plots at equally spaced distances (5 to 10 meters apart) along each transect.  A total of 300 such plots were established along 32 transects, and sampling of these plots resulted in the identification of 156 plant taxa within 9 plant community types.  Four of these are communities impacted by drainage, past soil disturbance, and altered vegetation.  Five more natural communities representing less disturbed condition were identified in the East Marsh WRP site.  A calcareous wet prairie was the most species rich community type, encompassing 143 identified plant taxa.  

Restoring Bayhead Swamp Communities  [Top]

Bayhead swamps are a form a seepage swamp, which are forested wetlands characterized by saturated soils rather than periodic inundation.  Many of these systems have been drained and converted to agricultural uses.  Many of the classic bayhead or baygall swamps formed where groundwater seeped along the fringe of the Lake Wales ridge in south-central Florida.  Most of these swamps were cleared and converted to grow high value agricultural crops, such as caladiums and gladiolas, on the rich muck soils formed under these swamps.  Wildlife species that use these swamps include Florida panther (Puma concolor), bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocepahlus), wood stock (Myteria americana), Florida black bear (Ursus americanus floridanus), squirrel tree frog (Hyla squirrella), and many other wetland species.

Estimates of wetland loss rates are not refined enough for meaningful estimates of the loss of bayhead swamp. One estimate is that 38% of forested wetland present at the time of European colonization remains in Florida.  Most wetland restoration projects in Florida have been aimed at restoring marsh wetlands and significant resoration of forested wetlands has only occurred in the past 15-20 years.  It it too early to evaluate how successful these restoration projects will be.

Historical aerial photos reveal that much of the West Marsh WRP site at MAERC was formerly bayhead swamp.  A remnant of the original swamp remains on the neighboring property to the west of the site, and there are a few scattered bay trees at limited number of locations within the WRP site.  Any true attempt at restoration of this site needs to include an attempt to reestablish or expand existing bayhead communities within the site.  

Bayhead restoration will involve two different approaches:

1)  Fence areas containing remnant bayhead trees to suppress fire and prevent cattle browsing on the bay trees.  

Although bay trees can withstand some degree of fire and grazing, intense amount of either inhibit regeneration of the trees, and we expect the trees will increase in abundance when fire and grazing are excluded.  The fencing will be imposed as a paired experimental treatment that will include fenced and unfenced plots in two different locations (blocks) where there are an adequate number of bay trees to serve as a base for expansion.  The plant communities in these paired plots will be evaluated as part of the the wetland plant community assessment described above.  

2)  Plant selected bayhead tree species in fenced plots that will be protected from fire and grazing.

In addition to encouraging natural expansion of bayhead from existing remnant trees, we also propose to plant selected tree species, such as sweetbay (Magnolia virginiana), swamp bay (Persea palstris), red bay (Persea borbonia), and red maple (Acer rubrum).  Survivorship and growth of the planted trees will be monitored along with associated changes in the entire plant community in the planted areas.

Evaluating Impacts of Cattle Grazing on Restored Sites  [Top]

USDA-NRCS staff are eager for more information on using grazing as a management tool in restored wetland plant communities.  Cattle is viewed as an agricultural use with potentially negative impact on restored wetland sites, but with proper management of winter (dry season) cattle may actually help control invasion of woody and shrub species and may also enhance plant species diversity.  More information is need on the effects of cattle on these systems.  We propose to evaluate the effects of cattle by placing grazing exclosures around sampling points on the permanent transects established to monitor changes in the plant community at the sites.  Small grazing exclosures of 10m x 10m will be established around two randomly selected sampling plot along 20 of the transects to evaluate the effects of grazing on representative plant communities in the WRP sites.  Areas of remnant bay stands in West 770 marsh will be divided into a grazed and ungrazed sections with larger fenced areas to examine the effect of cattle grazing on regeneration of bayhead from remnant stands.  

Soil Carbon Storage [Top]

Wetlands soils accumulate significant amount of soil organic carbon due to the high productivity of wetland systems and the flooded conditions that inhibit the decomposition of organic matter.  We will evaluate baseline soil organic matter content for the two WRP sites to assess soil carbon storage in these systems and changes in soil carbon content following hydrologic restoration.

Conversion of bayhead swamp to wet prairie at the West 770 March site involved a shift in the plant community from bayhead trees, which have a C-3 photosynthetic pathway, to C-4 grasses.  The carbon in the tissues of these plants differ in its isotopic composition, with C-3 plants being more depleted  in ¹³C relative to C-4 plants which are more enriched in ¹³C.  We are using the different isotopic composition of these dominant plants to examine how shifts in the plant community and alteration of landscape hydrology has influenced soil C turnover and composition.  On three different ranches, we will compare soil C storage and ¹³C content in remnant bayhead swamps and adjacent areas that were converted from swamp to C-4 pasture.

Funding Sources

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