Performance of wetland environmental quality assessment indicators at evaluating palustrine wetlands in northeastern New York State

Abstract

The United States Environmental Protection Agency delegates to States and Tribes primary responsibility for monitoring the condition of wetlands under their jurisdiction, and suggests that wetland assessment be performed in a buildable process deemed the 1-2-3 framework. Level One assessment uses remotely-sensed data, Level Two uses a checklist of site attributes during a single visit, and Level Three includes effortful field surveys of biotic and water quality indicators. We used 16 accepted wetland assessment metrics that varied in levels of effort to evaluate the ecological integrity of 71 palustrine wetlands in New York State, including wetlands with a broad range of disturbance histories. We detected significant correlations across multiple levels and within levels, which indicates that these metrics, regardless of effort, are measuring similar attributes of wetlands. Most metrics also successfully distinguished between three wetland disturbance groups: natural, restored, and Area of Concern. The implication of this finding is that the landscape setting (as assessed by Level One) is linked to the biotic wetland community (as assessed by Level Three), and can be used to predict the ecological condition of a wetland using less complex methods. The relationships did have limits, however, indicating that some metrics either cannot be substituted or may not be as effective as previously thought at evaluating ecological condition of palustrine wetlands. The positive associations among the Levels indicate that it is possible to efficiently and validly evaluate and monitor wetlands using the 1-2-3 framework with appropriately selected indicator metrics.