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Wild for Wetlands

Playing in the mud makes her happy.

That’s what Suzanne Torre ’06 discovered when she traded her calculator and dress shoes for a shovel and rubber boots.

Five years ago, Torre made a difficult decision. After 12 successful years in the business world handling benefits and payroll administration, she decided to return to school. “I didn’t feel that I was doing the work I was put here to do,” she says. “I was good at what I did, but in my heart, I’m an environmentalist. It sounds corny, but I wanted to make a difference.”

Torre has always been interested in wetlands, so she was delighted when the lab for one of her biology classes studied a wetland in a Salem industrial site that once housed the old Fairview Training Center. “Wetlands are a vital part of the Willamette Valley,” she explains. “They’re important because they help prevent floods, purify water and provide many ecosystem services we tend to take for granted. This whole region was wetland and wet prairie before settlers came in and developed the land for homes, businesses and agriculture.”

The Fairview wetland, which runs along Pringle Creek, is a mitigated wetland, meaning a developer or government agency drained or filled in a natural wetland and built another to compensate for the habitat lost. “The mitigated wetland we’re working on was degraded agricultural land,” Torre explains. “Ten or 12 years ago, the City of Salem bought the land to encourage business development. As part of that sale, they agreed to take on the responsibility of mitigating for the wetland.”

Mitigated wetlands are built using soil from a natural wetland and planted with traditional wetland plants—grasses, sedges and rushes. While these plants are important for the hydrology of the wetland habitat, flowering plants—what biologists call “forbes”—are often overlooked. “Flowering plants are a big component of natural wetlands, but they usually don’t get planted much in mitigated wetlands. They’re not considered as important,” Torre says. “But reintroducing these native plants increases the biodiversity of the site, which increases the invertebrates and food for animals like birds and other vertebrate predators. Wetlands with flowering plants are more complete functioning wetlands.”

A $3,000 Carson Grant funded Torres’ research into whether a native flowering plant could be successfully introduced into a mitigated wetland like Fairview. She introduced two species of camas, a bulb traditionally used for food by native tribes in the valley. “Camas is a stable of intact wetlands, and it was here before the settlers,” she says. “Lewis and Clark drew pictures of camas and took samples of it when they came here. The plant has historical importance in the Willamette Valley.”

Braving cold, wet winter days, Torre and volunteers planted nearly 700 camas bulbs. She came back the following fall and planted more than 800 more. When she slogged back out to see how the bulbs had survived, she was thrilled with the results. “The survival of the camas is high, and of those bulbs that survived, the reproduction rate is high, too. Our preliminary results suggest that camas can be reintroduced into mitigated wetlands.”

While she found moles and other animals were eating a number of bulbs, she is philosophical about finding holes instead of bulbs. “We’re contributing to the diet of these animals.”

In restoring a mitigated wetland, one of the biggest challenges Torre faced was controlling invasive plant species like tansy, Canadian thistle and Himalayan blackberry. “If these invasive plants aren’t controlled, they can take over and destroy the wetland. So the question is, do you weed or control the strongly invasive species so the wetland can continue to be functional? Does the wetland then become a park? Once the invasive species are removed and the wetland and wet prairie plants are more established, the invasive plants will likely become less of an issue.”

The project has taken on dimensions Torre never expected. “I always knew the research was going to be time consuming, but until you design a project and are out there in the field 12 to 16 hours a day, you don’t know how it can consume your life.”

But the time commitment wasn’t the only surprise. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the project has been introducing school children to wetlands. “I brought 35 kids from the Heritage School out to the site,” she says. “They saw a gopher, found a couple of snakes and a bunch of birds, and got dirty and wet. They loved it.”

Torre and her faculty advisor, Biology Professor Susan Kephart, have won an environmental grant from the City of Salem to continue and expand work on the Fairview Mitigation Wetland. She hopes to continue working in wetland restoration after graduation and would like to see a hiking trail and interpretive center built at the Fairview site. “It’s a slow process, but maybe we can get the kids and the community involved. This project is like throwing a rock in a pond. It just keeps rippling outward.”

Pages in this article...

Page 1

Changing the Pardigm (Introduction)

Page 2

Buried Treasure

Page 3

Paving the Hydrogen Highway

Page 4

Wild for Wetlands