Wetlands Month | Arkansas NRCS

Little Rock, Ark., May 10, 2004 – A wetland project in Pulaski County gives the state a historic opportunity to regain thousands of acres of wetlands during American Wetlands Month.

The 7,186 acre project, between Wrightsville and Woodson in the Pennington Bayou watershed, includes 12 landowners. The project is in the planning stages now and work will begin in June with the hydrology restoration.

“This is the first project in the nation where individual landowners formed a group to restore land to a wetland,” said Mark Tidwell, a wildlife biologist at the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Hazen Technical Service Center.

Bruce I. Knight, chief of NRCS, will visit the project area at noon May 14 to commemorate American Wetlands Month.

“We are extremely enthusiastic to see the work begin. The project will totally reconfigure marginal farmland and change it into recreational land that will greatly enhance wildlife habitat,” said Gar Lile, who was the initial applicant with 1,140 acres. “We are taking non-irrigated farmland in the Arkansas River corridor and returning it to its natural state.”

Work began in December 2002, with a survey of the entire Woodson area -- 8,417 acres.

“With the number of houses, roads and the amount of land not in the easement, we surveyed the entire area to ensure we wouldn’t flood a road or land not in the project,” Tidwell said.

“To accomplish this we used eight GPS survey rover units from NRCS and two from the Audubon of Arkansas,” he said. “The bulk of the survey was completed in six days.”

“Our first restoration will include constructing levees and installing pipes to create shallow water. Tree plantings will begin in the fall of 2004,” Tidwell said.

“Once the project is complete we will have 2,100 acres of shallow and permanent water areas, 250 acres of native grasses and more than 3,500 acres of trees,” he said.

“We have enough data on the forest of the Arkansas River that we can go into the Woodson easement and recreate a representative forest type that once existed in the Arkansas River valley lowlands,” Tidwell said.

Arkansas is second state in the nation with more than 149,000 acres enrolled in NRCS’ Wetlands Reserve Program. The program helps landowners protect, restore and enhance wetlands on their property. WRP is a key element in meeting President Bush’s goal “to restore and to improve and to protect at least three million acres of wetlands over the next five years.”

WRP is a voluntary program offering landowners the opportunity to protect, restore and enhance wetlands on their property.

By placing agricultural lands into WRP, the NRCS provides resting, loafing and foraging habitat for migratory waterfowl, songbirds, shorebirds, wading birds and other wetland species.

The improvement of water quality as a value of wetlands and wetland restoration is an often overlooked benefit of WRP. Enrolling large contiguous tracts of erosion-prone farmland has greatly decreased sediment in major rivers such as the White and Black rivers in central Arkansas.

Wetlands also benefit the nation by reducing flooding, recharging ground water, protection biological diversity and providing educational, scientific and recreational activities.

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NRCS celebrates American Wetlands Month