Mike Engel
Workers dig part of the final water control structure at Falk Wells Sugar River Wildlife Area in late August.
More than an inch of rain came down last night and clumps of mud are clinging to our boots. It’s late August and Lars Higdon and Mike Engel are showing me the wetland preservation work being done in the Falk Wells Sugar River Wildlife Area, a parcel of Dane County parkland south of Verona. We have just come from a site where a small work crew with a large excavator is digging into the earth to build a water control structure. Now we are visiting a nearby site where this work is complete.
It doesn’t look like much.
A berm has been built a few hundred feet from the Sugar River. There is a pipe on either side to drain water away and a box that can be opened to control the level of the water being held back. Engel, a 23-year veteran of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, bends down and opens the box.
“What happens is that water can go into that pipe and then there’s a series of boards in here,” he says. “And based on how many boards we have in here, the water is held up to that line. If we remove the boards, then it can go as low as the pipe. Basically, we can hold five feet more water than natural.”
The water control structures are part of a much larger strategy of managing public and private lands in the age of climate change. Improving the diversity and health of natural places, especially wetlands, keeps carbon out of the atmosphere and can lessen the impacts of severe weather events.
Higdon, a botanist/naturalist with the Dane County Land & Water Resources Department, explains that much of the public land acquired by the county “has been degraded or damaged in some way over time, whether it’s agriculture, erosion, stormwater runoff, or invasive species encroachment.” His job and that of others is “to restore these areas, bring them back to health, which means bringing back wildlife habitat, stabilizing soils so they don’t erode, promoting carbon sequestration, increasing access to recreation and pollinator habitat, and all that kind of stuff.”
Engel, who is overseeing the Falk Wells project, says the parcel was picked because it is a popular fishing, canoeing and kayaking destination. “We look at resource opportunities not only for wildlife but also for the people of Dane County,” he tells me. “There was a real opportunity here to make this property better.”
As environmental writer Lisa Gaumnitz noted in a recent article for The Nature Conservancy, such efforts are known as nature-based solutions. Among them: “Protecting remaining forests, wetlands and grasslands; using farming practices that safeguard clean water and improve soil health; and replacing concrete-lined streambeds with naturalized channels and native landscaping.”
In fact, such efforts can be a key component — the more the merrier — in the fight against climate change. A 2017 study by The Nature Conservancy scientists shows that natural solutions to climate change can provide as much as one-third of the emission reductions needed by 2030 to avoid the worst-case scenario.
“Wetlands play an incredibly important role in helping to tackle climate change,” says Nick Miller, science and strategy director for The Nature Conservancy in Wisconsin. “They provide a diversity of habitat niches that many species need to thrive and survive, and they help purify waters and reduce flooding. And so as we protect wetlands and restore them, it’s also helping natural systems and communities adapt.”
Miller explains how wetlands function as a carbon sink: “The vegetation, just through the process of photosynthesis, takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then stores the carbon in vegetation and then ultimately in the soils as vegetation dies and begins to decompose. Those peat or muck layers can be very deep and store a lot of carbon. Not all wetlands store the same amount of carbon, and some are far more effective than others. But all of them are playing some role.”
To help maximize the benefits of this carbon sequestration, The Nature Conservancy and others have developed a web-based mapping tool called Wetlands By Design. Says Miller: “It’ll tell you which ones are the most important for carbon storage, which ones are the most important for various aspects of water quality like nitrogen and phosphorus reduction, which ones are the most important for protecting shorelines from being vulnerable to storm events, which ones are most important for helping to reduce floods. So it’s a pretty powerful tool.”
The state has roughly five million to six million acres of remaining wetlands, down from about 10 million originally. Some 75 to 80 percent of these wetlands are in private hands.
“Wetlands conservation work is most effective when a community has specific objectives in mind and the information needed to identify which wetlands to protect and restore to address local priorities,” says Erin O’Brien, policy programs director for the Wisconsin Wetlands Association. “Identifying priorities that position wetlands as solutions is a really effective way to engage landowners, policymakers, and funders in wetlands conservation work.”
Bill Lueders
Mike Engel shows how the water level can be adjusted by adding or removing boards.
The day in late August when I meet with Higdon and Engel is the final day of a phase of work being done at the 379-acre Falk Wells parcel. Once part of the Bruce Company tree nursery, the park is named after Kathleen Falk, the former Dane County executive, and Topf Wells, her longtime chief of staff and a volunteer with the group Trout Unlimited.
The project, funded at a bargain cost of $50,000, is, like many such restorations, a collaborative effort, with partners including Ducks Unlimited and the Wisconsin DNR, through its waterfowl stamp program. Volunteers have yanked invasives and sowed prairie seeds. The soil has been strategically scraped in places to make it a more inviting habitat for certain species. Water control structures have been built into the landscape.
“We’re trying to keep that water on site longer,” Engel explains, referring to the downpour of the night before. “And by having permanent vegetation, roots in the grass, it breaks the energy of that precipitation.”
Work like this is being done on parkland throughout Dane County, mostly by small, local contractors. Engel says this has helped make it all-around politically popular: “We’re giving tax dollars to constituents to do restoration.”
Engel also works with private landowners who “want to see more frogs and turtles for their kids or they’d like to see some ducks coming in to live there, dragonflies. Some people do it for bigger reasons, like they know it’s important for water quality.”
Laura Hicklin is director of the Dane County Land & Water Resources Department, which operates out of a gorgeous building on Madison’s southeast side named after former Dane County Board Supv. Lyman Anderson. Her department, with a current annual operating budget of $11.7 million, has divisions devoted to water resource engineering and land conservation, as well as the county’s 17,000 acres of parks and natural resource areas. It has about 80 full-time and a comparable number of seasonal staff.
Land preservation, she says, has been “a priority of the county and its departments for many decades.” This has given it “a framework to work off of, to kind of stack or layer on these other projects that deal with climate change.”
One active project involves the removal of sediment from the Yahara River to allow it to better adapt to the changing rain cycles. “We know that we’re going to have periods of drought and then we’re going to have periods of really intense above-average rainfall events,” Hicklin says. “The most recent would have been in 2018 and 2019, where we see this really intense flooding. And so the county has responded to that, realizing that because of our use over decades, we’ve been filling the Yahara River with sediment and the water that we’re now receiving with these more intense rainfalls doesn’t have any place to go.”
The county recently completed a major wetland restoration project at Pheasant Branch Conservancy that spanned several years and cost $900,000. It has just opened bids to do a 300-acre wetland restoration at Walking Iron Wildlife Area in the village of Mazomanie that will probably take three or four years and cost between $500,000 and $600,000. And a green infrastructure plan has just been developed for the headwaters of Black Earth Creek.
“We’re going to continue to protect floodplains and restore wetlands,” Hicklin says. “We’re going to find areas where we can engineer and construct [projects] that protect and complement the natural systems. And we’d like to see that happening throughout the watershed.”
