From Duke to the Everglades to Iraq
Curtis Richardson's Wetland Journey Sheds New Light on One
of Nature's Historically Maligned Assets p.4
By adding and removing water from a dammed up impoundment
there, researchers and students will be able to study the
effects of actually lowering and raising the wetland’s
water table. “I don’t think there is another place
in the country that will be able to do this,” he says.
Such water controls should even reduce the mosquito population,
an issue to consider amid concerns about the West Nile virus.
“If we have a problem we can lower the water table and
dry out the wetland—which wetlands do,” he notes.
In addition, the sides of the water impoundment area will
also be sloped to discourage mosquito egg laying, he notes.
At other strategic points along the creek and its tributaries,
“bioretention” areas are also being built to see
if these wetland-like pockets of absorbent soils, gravel or
vegetation can further improve the quality of water degraded
by passage through the urban Durham environment.
“Students have had a tremendous learning experience,”
he says of the new wetlands project. “Class ratings
have gone up exponentially. They’re saying this is the
most fun, innovative, hands-on experience they’ve ever
had.”
Over the past decade, all these projects and others have
brought the Wetland Center about $16 million in funding for
research and education. Just as Richardson was launching his
latest effort so close to home, a new and vital need drew
him to a fabled and massively despoiled wetland in Iraq.
For more than 5,000 years an indigenous Marsh Arab culture
had been quietly living in a 20,000 square kilo-meter wetland
that some legends identify as the site of the Garden of Eden.
What was once a huge green buffer in an arid area has now
been reduced by 90 percent, Richardson estimates, through
a combination of upstream damming, repeated warfare, and deliberate
draining by the forces of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
“This is the largest degradation of any wetlands in
modern times in the world, an amazing tragedy that took place
mostly in the last decade,” Richardson said. In June,
he was the only university researcher on a four-member fact-finding
team that visited the still-dangerous area.
They visited former marshlands that had become dust bowls.
These were tragic wastelands where luxurious date palm groves
once bore fruit and water buffalo once grazed amid luxurious
carpets of a keystone giant reed. There were other places
that locals had started to re-flood. But, in some cases, the
introduced water had drawn too much salt out of the long-dry
soils to support fresh water vegetation.
Yet the group found that a nucleus for restoration remains.
Richardson met impoverished but upbeat Marsh Arabs who were
re-occupying still roofless dwellings and beginning to fish
again.
Richardson also recognized that building specially constructed
wetlands within the salvageable areas could help locals allay
water contamination problems that have grown ubiquitous in
this war zone.
Before such science and engineering projects can happen,
he said that Iraq’s research infrastructure would have
to recover from years of decimation and neglect.
So he is already talking about bringing Iraqi scientists
to Duke for vital environmental and wetlands training that
they can take back home.
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