Restore wetlands… but do we know how?

Quebec researchers have just launched a major research project aimed at developing expertise in wetland restoration, which is practically non-existent in the province. An observation which should encourage the Ministry of the Environment to be more cautious by not authorizing their destruction so easily while promising to restore them with an objective of zero net loss.

We don’t know how to restore wetlands, right?

The short answer to this question is yes. Expertise is practically non-existent, say biologists Kim Marineau and Stéphanie Pellerin. “We don’t have the knowledge to do catering. There is a clear need for research,” says M.^me Marineau, president of the firm Biodiversité Conseil.

“If we want to do real catering, it’s knowledge that needs to be developed in Quebec,” adds M.^me Pellerin.

And the long answer?

A certain expertise has been built over the years for the restoration of peatlands, explains Stéphanie Pellerin, who is also a researcher at the Plant Biology Research Institute. “It took us 20 to 30 years to learn how to restore them. But peatlands are fairly simple ecosystems compared to other wetlands. We can generally apply the same recipe, whereas for marshes and swamps, it is much more complex. It’s almost on a case by case basis every time. »

How then can we build this expertise which is deficient?

An important research project has just started with the collaboration of researchers from the University of Montreal and Laval University. The RARE project (for Research and applications for informed restoration of wetlands) will benefit from funding of 10 million dollars and will be spread over a period of five years. “It will take us at least two years before we have our first results,” underlines M.^me Pellerin, who collaborates on the project. One of the objectives of the research is also to evaluate restoration costs, which are too often underestimated, she adds.

Do we even know if it really works? Can we really restore or create wetlands?

According to Stéphanie Pellerin, it is entirely possible to develop this type of expertise in Quebec, but it will take several years to get there. But as advanced as it is, science cannot match nature, at least when it comes to wetlands, says the researcher.

“There are ecological functions that we can recreate, but for others, it is much more complicated,” she explains. Restoring a wetland is much more complex than recreating a forest. »

So there is a risk that we won’t be able to recreate everything that was destroyed?

“The real scandal is not that we are not yet able to properly restore wetlands, it is that we continue to destroy them at this rate,” says Stéphanie Pellerin. Based on the fact that these are complex environments, difficult to reproduce, Quebec should apply a precautionary principle, she believes. It will be difficult to restore areas as large as those that have been backfilled since 2017, adds M^me Pellerin.

However, the new law was not supposed to slow down the destruction of wetlands?

There Law concerning the conservation of wetlands provides a sequence in the evaluation of projects, namely “avoid, minimize, compensate”. However, several environmental groups criticize the Ministry of the Environment for skipping the first two steps, and systematically moving on to compensation when authorizing a project. In addition, the amounts required by the Ministry do not seem to slow down the filling of wetlands, points out Stéphanie Pellerin. “The Ministry seems to have a lot of hope in the research project (RARE) to reverse the trend. But it’s like we’re not doing things in the right order. We should have made sure we had this expertise before destroying so many wetlands,” says Kim Marineau.