Improving Gwynedd's Wetlands

Wetlands are critical for ground water recharge and filtration, collecting stormwater runoff and filtering sediment, helping to keep our surface waters clean. Wetlands also offer valuable foraging and nesting sites for birds, turtles and other reptiles and amphibians. As many of you are aware, in 2000, Natural Lands Trust constructed two wetlands at Gwynedd Wildlife Refuge totaling four acres.

Building the wetlands is only the first step. We must continuously try to improve wetland habitat and minimize invasive plant species, so we routinely install new plantings at our wetland sites. During our wetland planting in the spring of 2003, we installed 5,000 wetland plants with the help of a high school senior volunteer group as well as NLT staff members. The plants were delivered in plug form (this is similar to what you can buy at a garden center to plant a vegetable garden). Each species comes in flats of 50 plugs and we planted each plug by hand. As you can imagine the volunteer help was greatly appreciated!

We planted 16 different species including swamp milkweed, tussock sedge, soft rush, and duck potato. The species planted, in most cases are preferred foods or cover for butterflies, wood ducks, and various songbirds. Just recently, we installed 500 trees and shrubs in and around the wetlands. Now that these plants are in we will be able to move out of design/plant mode and into a maintenance regime.