Restoring and creating wetlands for water quality improvement in agricultural territories

Abstract

Wetlands play a key role in improving the quality of the water that flows through them. As such, loss or degradation of wetland area can have severe consequence on water quality of receiving rivers, lakes, and coastal habitats. This often has catastrophic and expensive costs for society and provides many lessons to provide for better integration and management of wetlands in, particularly, agricultural landscapes. Using wetlands for water quality improvement is most successful when based on restoration of the hydro-geomorphologic characteristics of existing wetlands and when avoiding exceeding their loading capacity. This includes restoring riparian zones and river morphology in accordance with their spatial (longitudinal, transversal, and vertical) and temporal dynamics. Implementing restoration projects at a sufficiently large scale to mitigate nutrient impacts is major future challenge for wetland integration in agricultural landscapes, as this also necessitates resolving stakeholder socioeconomic and often cultural concerns that can consider restoration of wetlands as contrary to agricultural development. These challenges can be overcome by using experience of how restored and created wetlands can be integrated into both small-scale and large-scale socioeconomic development plans.