Meta-analysis of case studies has become an important tool for synthesizing case study findings in land change. Meta-analyses of deforestation, urbanization, desertification and change in shifting cultivation systems have been published. This present study adds to this literature, with an analysis of the proximate causes and underlying forces of wetland conversion at a global scale using two co...

Depressional forested wetlands or geographically isolated wetlands such as cypress swamps and Carolina bays are common land features in the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the southeastern US. Those wetlands play important roles in providing wildlife habitats, water quality improvement, and carbon sequestration. Great stresses have been imposed on those important ecosystems due to rapid human populat...

In the eastern U.S. Coastal Plain and Piedmont region, diverse inland wetlands (riverine, depressional, wet flats) have been impacted by or converted to agriculture. Farm Bill conservation practices that restore or enhance wetlands can return their ecological functions and services to the agricultural landscape. We review the extent of regional knowledge regarding the effectiveness of these con...

Few studies have measured removal of pollutants by restored wetlands that receive highly variable inflows. We used automated flow-proportional sampling to monitor the removal of nutrients and suspended solids by a 1.3-ha restored wetland receiving unregulated inflows from a 14-ha agricultural watershed in Maryland, USA. Water entered the wetland mainly in brief pulses of runoff, which sometimes...

Together with water vapour and carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) is an important greenhouse gas, because of its strong global warming potential of 23×CO2 on a 100year time scale. The atmospheric mixing ratio of CH4 has increased with 151 ± 25%, since pre-industrial times. About 60% of the global CH4 emission is of antropogenous origin. From the natural sources (wetlands, termites, oceans, CH4...

Wetlands serve an important purpose in flood control and water quality, but constructed-wetland sites also provide habitats for mosquito breeding. Communities near constructed-wetland sites often raise a "mosquito" objection when constructed wetlands are proposed. Wildlife and wetland advocates can confuse the public by making unsubstantiated claims about natural predators eliminating or contro...

Mapping the spatio-temporal characteristics of wetland 19 inundation has important significance to the study of wetland environment and 20 associated flora and fauna. High temporal remote sensing imagery is widely 21 used for this purpose with the limitations of relatively low spatial resolutions. In 22 this study, a novel method based on integration of back-propagation neural 23 network (BP) a...

Rising temperature causes a process of phosphorus release, which can be characterized well using phosphorus release rates (VP). The objective of the present study was to investigate the major factors affecting sediment phosphorus release rates through a wetland habitat simulation experiment. The results showed that the VP of different wetland sediments were different and changed with the order ...