Restoration progress and flood disturbance at IDOT wetland mitigation sites.

PDFTech ReportFHWA-ICT-13-016ICT-13-016UILU-ENG-2013-2010R27-114WetlandsFlood plainsFloodsPlantsVegetationPerformance measurementRestoration ecologyIllinoisIllinois. Dept. of Transportation. Bureau of Materials and Physical ResearchPociask, Geoffrey E.Matthews, Jeffrey W.Illinois Center for TransportationUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dept. of Civil and Environmental EngineeringUnited States. Federal Highway AdministrationUS Transportation CollectionAs required under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act and the Illinois Interagency Wetland Policy Act of 1989, the IllinoisDepartment of Transportation (IDOT) has established wetlands at mitigation sites throughout Illinois to compensate forimpacts to natural wetlands by road construction. One of the mechanisms for meeting regulatory obligations is to mitigatewetland impacts through restoration or creation of wetlands that provide functions similar to natural wetlands, under thefederal policy goal of \ue2\u20ac\u153no net loss\ue2\u20ac? of wetland area and function. Progress toward restoring wetland functions is measuredthrough the use of prescribed performance standards issued by state and federal regulatory agencies. In most cases, theseperformance standards contain measures of quality, health, and structure of wetland plant communities.The majority of extant Illinois wetlands and most IDOT wetland mitigation sites are located in floodplain areas and areexposed to varying degrees of flooding, depending on their location within a given watershed, their position within thefloodplain setting, and their climate zone within the state. Among the major challenges in attaining vegetation-basedperformance standards at IDOT wetland mitigation projects are poor plant-community quality (e.g., low species richness) andmortality of planted trees. Although floodplain wetlands are supported by regular flooding, floods can also produce excessivesediment, cause ice damage, and result in prolonged inundation\ue2\u20ac\u201dleading to mortality in wetland plants, thereby interruptingexpected trajectories of succession and progress toward achieving mitigation performance standards.In this study, we analyzed data collected by the Illinois Natural History Survey and the Illinois State Geological Surveyduring past and current site monitoring to examine the influence that flooding has on ecological mechanisms that lead tovariation in the performance levels among a large number of floodplain compensatory mitigation wetlands. The goals of theanalyses were to evaluate the influence that flooding has on (1) plant-community quality at the landscape scale and (2)species turnover within plant-community functional groups at wetland mitigation sites. For the first component of the analysis,we used simple linear regression to evaluate the influence of flooding on the levels of ten plant-community metrics. Results oflinear regression analysis showed significant, inverse relationships between mean annual flood exposure and average levelsof three of the ten plant-community metrics: species richness, floristic quality index (FQI), and proportion of perennial species.Also, we used hierarchical mixed models to evaluate the influence of flooding on loss and subsequent gain of species withinseven species functional groups. Mixed models showed significant correlation of the loss of species within all species groupswith magnitude of flood intensity in the same year, and the gain of non-hydrophytic, annual, and non-native species withmagnitude of flood intensity in the preceding year. Results of this study indicate two general tendencies at IDOT wetlandmitigation sites: (1) Higher average magnitudes of flooding will lead to decreased species richness, floristic quality, andproportion of perennials in floodplain settings and significantly decrease the likelihood of attaining performance standardsbased on these metrics; and (2) higher-magnitude floods will tend to disrupt succession by eliminating the species groups thatare associated with higher-quality plant communities and allow more undesirable species to colonize in the year followingflood disturbance. These tendencies highlight the importance of considering flood-disturbance regime, when evaluating thequality of plant communities in floodplain wetlands.Additionally, planted-tree counts and mapping were conducted to provide a baseline for future tree-survival studies atthree sites. Potential future studies would track survivorship of each tree species in response to flood disturbance