5-Year Study Could Help Save Wetlands : Environment: Funds for research aimed at restoring dwindling saltwater marshes clear U.S. House. A Senate vote is expected by August.

In a bid to save San Diego’s dwindling and endangered wetlands, scientists are forging a partnership to study methods for restoring local saltwater marshes that would be the first such research program on the West Coast, Rep. Bill Lowery (R-San Diego), said Monday.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently approved $600,000 for the wetland research, a project that would be split between efforts to restore the local wetlands and to examine how global warming affects the vulnerable areas.

If approved by the Senate, which is expected to vote on the program by August, the five-year project, to be funded by the Department of Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service, will unite biologists from San Diego State University and Fish and Wildlife Service who will probably work at the facilities of the Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute. Scientists would focus specifically on San Diego wetlands, but the information should be relevant throughout the region.

California leads the nation in losing its wetlands, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. During the past 200 years, 91% of the state’s wetlands have been destroyed, giving way to agriculture or urban development. In most other states, the loss is about 55%.

In San Diego, the picture is grim. In 1856, there were 2,674 acres of salt marsh in San Diego Bay alone, but in the mid-1980s only 203 acres were left, said Joy Zedler, SDSU professor of biology and director of the Pacific Estuarine Research Laboratory.

The loss of wetlands was accompanied by the loss of habitat for certain plants, fish, and insects--endangering several species.

“What we’ve lost is our heritage,” Zedler said.

Zedler would use half the funding to study methods to restore wetlands and lagoons, a process with which experts have not yet been successful. Man-made marshes, a product of environmental laws from the ‘70s, have not been able to duplicate the habitats provided by natural wetlands, Zedler said.

Cord grass, for instance, home for the imperiled light-footed clapper rail, does not grow well at man-made sites. Experts are only now discovering that the man-made sites have little of organic matter and nitrogen, materials that enable cord grass to flourish.

Key discoveries like this will enable scientists to help save the wetlands, Zedler said. But the list of endangered species is long, and experts are racing to prevent it from getting longer.

The California halibut no longer frequents the estuaries. And the endangered species range from the Belling’s savannah sparrow, which lives on pickleweed, to the California least tern. Increasing numbers of plants, such as the salt marsh bird’s beak, are also finding a spot on the endangered species list, Zedler said.

“We have a major problem,” said Lowery, who shepherded the funding bill that was approved June 25. “We need to ensure that the remaining wetlands are protected and properly utilized.”

Encroachment, however, is not the only threat to the wetlands. Global warming, or expected changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide that will increase the global temperature, could cause the ocean to rise up to 3 feet in the next 75 years, some experts believe. Experts fear that wetlands, squeezed between the rising ocean and developed land, will vanish.

Scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Service, working from the National Wetlands Research Center in Slidell, La., would undertake this half of the research.

“By learning more about restoration, we can understand how to move wetland areas affected by sea rise,” Zedler said.