Wetlands 101: Why These Habitats Matter

Ana Burns, senior area manager at Davey Resource Group (DRG), talks all about wetlands, their ecological importance and the work that DRG is doing to preserve these natural habitats. 

In this episode we cover: 

• What is Davey Resource Group (DRG)? (00:41)
• Ana's role at DRG (1:15)
• How is a wetland defined? (1:49)
• How are wetlands important to the environment? (2:54)
• How does DRG work with wetlands? (3:29)
• Sustainability and constructing around them (5:49)
• Cool plants that only grow in wetlands (6:50)
• Wetlands in the spring (8:20)
• The meaning behind preserving these natural areas (9:53)
• What does a DRG team do at a wetland? (10:52)
• Davey's SEED Campus wetland habitats (13:23)
• SEED Campus bog research (14:06)
• How did Ana choose this career path? (14:49)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

To learn more about DRG's wetland work, visit our Wetland and Stream Services site. 

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!

Transcript

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. I'm joined this week by Anna Byrne. She's a senior area manager for the Davey Resource Group in Kent, Ohio. Today, we're talking all about wetlands. Hi, Anna. How are you? Welcome to the show.

Anna Byrne: Thanks for having me today.

Doug: First off, tell me a little bit about the Davey Resource Group. What is that, and what do you guys do?

Anna: Sure. Davey Resource Group has been around since the early '90s. We are more the consulting arm of the Davey Tree Expert Company. We have a whole entire group of us that's devoted to ecological, environmental consulting. Then we have other parts of Davey Resource Group that are focused more on utility asset management and utility vegetation management.

Doug: Tell me a little bit about what you do with the resource group.

Anna: Right. I manage our environmental consulting team based here out of Kent, Ohio. We like to say this is where it all started. We have a team of more than 50 biologists, ecologists, urban foresters, geologists working here out of our Northern Ohio office. Providing environmental consulting services primarily here in the state of Ohio.

Doug: How is a wetland defined?

Anna: A wetland is defined by having three key characteristics. First, you have to have the right kind of hydric soils. Soils that have got features that indicate that there's been some kind of water present in the soil for some period of time. You have to have the right kind of vegetation. Certain types of plants like to grow in areas where there's a lot of water. Other types of plants can't sustain conditions where there's water present. You have to have water-loving plants. You also have to have signs of hydrology. Signs that indicate that there is water present in that area typically, for a duration of at least two weeks during the growing season.

That can be things like seeing watermarks on trees or blackened leaves on the ground.

Doug: What are the importance of wetlands in general?

Anna: Wetlands do a lot to help keep our water clean. They are basically nature's kidneys is a frequently heard term. They also provide a lot of habitat for plants and animals. Some wetlands are crucial in the lifecycle of certain types of animals that if we didn't have wetlands, they would not be able to survive.

Doug: Regarding wetlands, what does the Davey Resource Group do? What are your jobs when you're working on wetlands?

Anna: Sure. We have a staff that are trained wetland biologists. They're trained to go out and identify where wetlands are located, map them, and identify the quality of wetlands. With that information, we do a few different things. First, we can help to identify areas of high-quality wetlands to preserve and protect. We can also help our clients to identify wetlands. For example, we work for housing developers. We work for schools, hospitals. We do need to build. Our communities are growing. We can help developers of land identify where wetlands or other water resources are on their property and help to guide the design process to minimize and avoid, first, impacts to streams and wetlands.

Then sometimes impacts are unavoidable. Sometimes, in order to build that road or build that school, we might need to impact wetlands. In which case, then our team can help identify places where we could do wetland restoration. How can we restore wetlands and other parts of our watersheds to help improve wetland habitat in other areas and offset impacts to wetlands? Anytime you impact a wetland, you have to provide some offset to that impact in the form of what's called mitigation.

We do a lot of work in the mitigation realm as well, with respect to identifying sites where wetland restoration for mitigation would be appropriate, helping to design mitigation and wetland restoration projects, as well as stream restoration projects. Also, build and monitor those types of restoration projects.

Doug: Do you get a pretty good response when your team goes in and they're saying, "Hey, you've got a wetland here, let's try and build around it if we can."

Anna: I think most people these days in the developer world are very in tune to we need to minimize our impacts to wetlands. I think that for the most part, recognizing too if there's a wetland on the property, it's probably a low point, and it's going to be challenging. If you want to build something there, you're going to be constantly fighting the pressures of water because water is going to flow to the lowest point on your property. For the most part, I think people are interested in, okay, how can we develop this site and keep our development footprint outside of the boundary of a wetland or other water resources?

How can we develop in a more ecological-friendly way to be a little bit more sustainable for the long-term?

Doug: What are some of the cool plants that only grow in those wetland areas? I've had the opportunity to walk around some different bogs and such, and seeing the things that grow there are pretty unique.

Anna: They do have very unique plants. One of my favorite wetland plants is the Buttonbush. It's a beautiful shrub, and it gets these really cool flowering round flowers on it in the summer. They look almost, I don't know, the size of a small golf ball, maybe and are white. They're really beautiful, and they're an amazing wetland plant. There are wetland plants that have beautiful color to the landscape with beautiful flowers. Then there's plants that are small that you might hardly ever even see or recognize because they're so small.

Doug: All right, so let's go back to that Buttonbush because that's one of my favorite plants. It's such a great pollinator plant. We always see it growing on the side of the lake. Again, as you said, when you do have a low spot, that Buttonbush is perfect, and it'll bring in more butterflies than a butterfly bush. That's a pretty amazing plant. Besides the Buttonbush, what else do you see when you're in a wetland area?

Anna: One of my other favorite features about wetlands is in the spring. In the spring, you tend to have what's called vernal pools. Vernal pool is a depressional area, generally in a woodland area, where water collects, generally from snowmelt. You end up with these pools in the forest, and those are crucial habitat for amphibians in the spring. If you are out hiking in the spring, in the woods, checking out the vernal pools and looking in those vernal pools for tadpoles and all sorts of other fun little wetland critters. Love vernal pools in the spring.

Doug: When I'm out on the lake early in the season before the trees leaf out, I hear all the spring peepers. Would a vernal pool be something that they would be part of?

Anna: Spring peepers require a vernal pool as part of their tadpole lifecycle. If you didn't have vernal pools, you wouldn't have spring peepers.

Doug: Growing up in Ohio in the flatlands, we always, and I grew up in front of a wetland, and those spring peepers would sing you to sleep. Living now in Pennsylvania, where it's much more hilly, we don't have as many of those flat spots. Only here and there do I get to hear those. Spring peepers, it reminds me of home back in Ohio. Tell me a little bit for you what it means to be working to preserve these wetlands, because it seems like that'd be a pretty cool thing.

Anna: It is a really cool thing. One of my earliest memories as a kid was going to a quaking bog in upstate New York. Every summer, we would go and vacation in upstate New York. I loved going out to the bog and looking at the pitcher plants and all the other really cool features of a bog. In my career, the ability to be able to actually work in those environments and work in wetlands and outside and helping to preserve and protect and enhance our natural areas has just been instilled in me since I was a kid.

Doug: When you do send a team out to a project, tell me a little bit about what they're doing when they get there. What are they looking for and what do they want to accomplish? I know it's case by case, but in general, what are you sending them out to do?

Anna: Right. Before we even send anybody out to the field, our team of wetland scientists first look at any existing data and maps that we have for a property. We're checking to see what kind of soils have been mapped for the site. Are there any indications on the national wetland inventory maps of wetlands that might already be thought to be present on the site? We're looking at a lot of secondary source data before we even go out to a project. Once we get out there, we generally are sending at least two people out to look at a property to map wetlands.

They're out there with a whole host of equipment. They have a special book, the Munsell soil survey book, to help them identify what kind of soils are present on the site. They have either a soil probe or a shovel so they can help access the soils. They are out with GPS equipment. We can collect data points and come back with mapping data that helps us take the boundary of a wetland and put it into a GIS or CAD system to help map its location in relation to other site features. When they get out to a site, they generally start. They plan their project to start in a specific location and traverse across the entirety of the property.

They need to look at outer edges of wetlands. They need to walk through wetlands. They have to even investigate. You may think you're going only out to a field that is agricultural and has no wetlands, but until you put your feet on the ground and physically look at the entirety of the site, you can't say for sure whether or not wetlands are present. When you're going out to a property to look for wetlands, you have to walk the entirety of the property.

Doug: I have visited there in Kent and seen the seed campus. I know that there is a bog there, right? Which is right up your alley.

Anna: There is a bog, and that is right up my alley. We are super excited to have the seed campus property and have the opportunity to not only preserve and protect, and manage. The bog that's at the seed campus, but also our seed campus, is bordered by the Cuyahoga River and also contains a lot of floodplain wetlands associated with the Cuyahoga River. We have some really great wetland habitat over at our seed campus.

Doug: Tell me about the data that you're finding at that bog.

Anna: We are setting up monitoring plots in the bog where we will continue over the next several years to collect biological data. We're looking at what animals are using the bog for habitat, and we are also looking at what kinds of plants are in our bog. Once we have that data, we'll be looking at what do we need to do as a company to be good stewards of that part of our property. How do we manage and maintain this bog so it can provide habitat for years to come?

Doug: Before I let you go, tell me how you got into this. Why is this job right for you? Because you're definitely passionate about it.

Anna: Why is this job right for me? Oh, that's a really good question. I always wanted a job that gave me the flexibility to not only work in an office, but to also be outside. I've always enjoyed hiking, boating, being in a lake. Just being outside in general has always just been part of who I am. Being able to work in a career where I get to go outside as part of my job is what led me to where I am now.

Doug: Good stuff, Anna. Thanks so much for your time and schooling us on wetlands. I really appreciate it.

Anna: Fantastic. You're very welcome. It was lovely to speak with you today.

Doug: Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Do me a big favor. As always, I want you to subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss a show, and what should we be covering? That's what I want to know. There's two ways to tell us. You can send us an email to podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S @ D-A-V-E-Y.com. You can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message. Your ideas might be on a future podcast. We'd love to hear from you. As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

[00:16:38] [END OF AUDIO]