ORAL PRESENTATION CO-AUTHOR: Brad Strobel (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Necedah National Wildlife Refuge) TITLE: A community of conservation: Restoring a watershed in the heart of “Sand County” ABSTRACT: A century ago, "steam shovels sucked dry the marshes of central Wisconsin," leaving the landscape ecologically and economically poorer. For the past 5 years, our group of conservation partners has leveraged their skills to restore the ecosystem services and ecological benefits that these wetlands provided. Federal, state, and local governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and community leaders worked together to plan, fund, permit, and implement a novel wetland restoration in the headwaters of this HUC (hydrologic unit code) 10 watershed. The landscape of this project is awash with cultural and conservation history from the generations of Ho-Chunk people living here to the inspiration it offered Aldo Leopold. To restore this landscape, we are employing concepts straight from the pages of Leopold’s writing. We are releasing a river from the ditches and dams that confined it and restoring thousands of wetland acres by disabling miles of arterial ditches. We are seeing immediate, dramatic, and lasting changes to surface and groundwater. We have initiated research to better understand this project's impact on carbon storage and sequestration and have implemented novel road construction techniques to create flood resilient roads that facilitate water storage and decrease downstream flooding. We will describe our methods, successes, and, importantly, our lessons learned to date. We believe these methods are applicable in other nearby watersheds, but recognize that the conditions that have allowed us to be successful may not exist everywhere. While we have made substantial progress, we are gaining momentum and undoubtedly will be sharing a more complete report at the 2027 Wetland Science Conference. BIO: Mark Pfost worked for the US Fish & Wildlife Service for twenty-two years, the last twelve as a private-lands biologist, helping restore wildlife habitat on private lands across nine central Wisconsin counties. After retiring, he was hired by the Wisconsin Waterfowl Association as a wetland ecologist to search out and conduct wetland restorations on Wisconsin DNR-owned and -managed lands.