From this website-
http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/5061761.html
'Re-peat' plan is restoring wetlands lost to farming
Larry Oakes Star Tribune Staff Writer
November 1, 2004 PEAT1101
DULUTH -- Decades ago, people dug a lot of ditches to try to drain portions of the vast swamps northwest of Duluth, the better to grow crops.
Today such swamps are known as wetlands, and it's illegal to drain or pave even an acre of one without adding or restoring at least an acre somewhere else.
And that's why scientists from the University of Minnesota have been plugging ditches at the Fens Research Facility, a 350-acre tract near Zim.
They've graded it flat as a pancake and are carefully planting it with wild mosses, sedges, Labrador tea and other bog plants, doing much of the work in the winter, when the swampy ground is frozen.
Essentially, they're doing the reverse of what frozen food mogul Jeno Paulucci did in the 1950s.
Paulucci ditched and drained the same land to grow vegetables in the moist soil; they're turning his creation, which he ran as Wilderness Valley Farms, back into a wooded swamp and peat bog.
A peat bog bank too, as it turns out.
Federal and state laws require developers who are forced to destroy a wetland to purchase "mitigation credits" in restored wetlands somewhere else.
Minnesota has many such wetland banks, representing several of the state's eight types of wetlands -- shallow marshes, deep marshes and shrub swamps, for example.
But the one at the Fens tract is the first in the United States to provide a mix of wooded swamp and peat bog, according to the soil scientist who spearheaded the project, Thomas Malterer of the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
Internationally, scientists who specialize in bogs stand to benefit from the knowledge gained as the conversion from vegetable farm to natural habitat is studied and chronicled, Malterer said.
'Like rare diamonds'
Before the Fens bog bank even opened, a couple of customers were waiting outside the door, so to speak.
"In the wetland world, these credits are like very large, rare diamonds," said John Bray, a regional spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), which plans to spend about $1.6 million to buy an easement or "credits" on about 200 acres of the site.
The department wants to use the credits to widen U.S. Hwy. 53 to four lanes across about 20 miles of bog country between Virginia and Cook, in northeastern Minnesota, and to build a modern interchange where that highway joins Hwy. 169 to Ely.
MnDOT says the approximately $70 million project is badly needed for safety and traffic flow, but will require the destruction of wetlands of the same types as on the Fens site.
Having credits for the same type of wetland is a distinct advantage because regulators will allow an acre-for-acre exchange instead of insisting on a significant gain, as often happens when the wetlands are of different kinds, Bray said.
"This is the only situation we know of in the entire country where a transportation department was able to purchase [these types of] wetland credits," Bray said. "They are the highest quality wetlands you can buy."
The other ready customer was another state agency, the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources, which bought an easement on 100 acres of the Fens bog, to help county road departments and other local governments mitigate wetland destruction.
"When you widen the shoulders of a road, you're going to impact a wetland," said Mark Nelson, a staff conservationist for the board in northeastern Minnesota. "There's often no alternative; changing the alignment of the road would impact wetlands even more."
From farm to fen
The agencies are paying the university $8,000 per acre of credit, or $2.4 million, which is about twice as much as it will cost the university to restore those acres. The university plans to use the extra revenue to endow a trust fund to continue its research into wetlands and their restoration.
For the university's Malterer, who grew up on a farm in an era when wetlands got little respect, putting the Fens back into nature's hands felt pretty strange at times, he said.
It apparently looked pretty strange too, as bulldozers plugged ditches and a manure spreader sprayed frozen plant material harvested from a nearby "donor bog."
"Farmers stopped and said, 'What in the world are you doing?'" Malterer said.
But, aside from offending ancestral impulses to clear and drain all land in sight, the project is a pretty happy ending for Wilderness Valley Farms, Malterer said.
"It replaces wetlands, the road projects will help economic development, it highlights past research and it gives us a long-term monitoring site. It has win-win written all over it."
Very exciting article on mitigation
Fantastic!
I think in 2001 when I went to Ely I took a $125 taxi ride On Hwy 169. The airlines missed my connection and put me in a taxi from Duluth airport to downtown Ely at their expense.
The bogs and fens around Ely in the BWCA were by far the best I've ever seen.
You have actually been to this site?
Oh my gosh!
I wanna go! I wanna go! I wanna go!
No, sorry, I cannot honestly say I've actually been to that location, In fact, since the airline screwed up and I missed my flight from Minneapolis to Ely, they gave me first class to Duluth, then the above mentioned taxi ride. Since it was first class I took advantage of the "free beer"...need I say more, other than the taxi ride was a blur!! I've since given up beer by the way. But by all means get to Ely, Stay at http://www.blueheronbnb.com/ and visit the fens and bogs in the BWCA. it's closer to you than to me!
By the way Equilib, I/we (me and the Pitcherplant prof) are looking for seeds or plants of the bay starvine Schisandra glabra: http://www.sas.usace.army.mil/pstrvine.htm It is the only native relative of the magnolia vine Schisandra chinensis. any help would be most appreciated!
Sorry honey, I've never seen anything like that up here and I haven't seen anything like that in SC either.
Here's a link on it from the usda-
http://plants.usda.gov/cgi_bin/plant_profile.cgi?symbol=SCGL7
I am thinking that you might have a shot at it if you contacted the Wild Ones in states where it occurs naturally. This time of year is when the seed exchanges are hot and heavy. Start putting your feelers out right NOW.
Go to this website-
http://www.for-wild.org/chapters.html
Both Kentucky and Sout Carolina which is the native range for this plant have chapters. My bet is you will get your plant and your seed!