Sessions
Concurrent Session: Effective wetland conservation partnerships
9:30 AM - 10:30 AM Thu
ORAL PRESENTER
CO-AUTHOR: Nick McCabe, ISG
TITLE: Rural Landowners: Key partners in successful invasive species management in wetland restorations
ABSTRACT: The wetland bank program is a system where public and private entities can restore wetlands to create credits that are used to offset authorized wetland impacts elsewhere within the watershed. The number of credits, and ultimately dollars, a landowner can earn from a privately owned wetland bank relies, in part, on the quality of vegetation within the wetland restoration. At the end of a 5-year monitoring period, the relative percent cover of nonnative or invasive species must typically be below 10% for credit release. In this way, the wetland bank program incentivizes landowners to be active managers to control and prevent invasive species establishment. Although rural landowners in agricultural watersheds may not have experience managing diverse wetland plant communities before starting a wetland bank project, they often have the skills and equipment necessary to be able to effectively manage invasives themselves with a little bit of technical expertise from consultants. In this talk, we will highlight successes and lessons learned from teaching landowners how to manage invasive species before, during, and after wetland restoration construction.
BIO: Kaitlyn O’Connor is a Certified Ecological Restoration Practitioner based out of La Crosse, Wisconsin. As a plant ecologist at ISG, she collaborates with an interdisciplinary team of engineers, landscape architects, and environmental scientists to restore habitat and integrate native biodiversity into the built environment.