Mid-Atlantic Wetland Monitoring and Assessment

EPA's mid-Atlantic office developed and helps facilitate the Mid-Atlantic Wetland Workgoup (MAWWG) , a nationally recognized regional wetland monitoring workgroup that assists states in building their capacity to implement and sustain wetland assessment and monitoring programs.

MAWWG is funded through a wetland program development grant to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection . The workgroup is administered by staff from the Pennsylvania State University Riparia .

Building the capacity of states to assess the biological, chemical and physical integrity of wetlands is an EPA National Wetlands Program priority. A National Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Work Group was established in 1999. The Mid-Atlantic Wetland Monitoring Work Group (MAWWG) is a subgroup of this organization and consists of members from the following states:

• Delaware
• Maryland
• Pennsylvania
• Virginia
• West Virginia
• New Jersey
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio

Monitoring and Assessment Highlights

Tidal Wetland Assessment

The Virginia Institute for Marine Science, Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control and Maryland Department of Natural Resources worked together on development of a multi-level (Level I, Level II and Level III) tidal wetland inventory and assessment methodology for the Delmarva peninsula (Delaware, Maryland and Virginia). This project, funded by an EPA wetland program development grant, represented a remarkable collaborative effort among states to develop a consistent characterization of natural resources with measurement methods and statistical designs that are consistent across the entire Mid-Atlantic region.

Mid-Atlantic Tidal Wetland Rapid Assessment Method (PDF)(48 pp, 2.9M , About PDF)  

Virginia's Landscape Level Assessment of all Mapped Wetlands

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science  in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality used geographic information systems (GIS) to characterize the capacity of every mapped wetland in Virginia to provide water quality and habitat services using remotely sensed data.  Mapped wetlands can be viewed using the Wetland Condition Assessment Tool (WetCAT).   Read more about WetCAT and find a link to it on Virginia DEQ's Monitoring and Assessment Strategy.  This ground-breaking work was funded through Wetland Program Development Grants.

Nanticoke & Juniata Rivers Watershed Wetland Studies

These pilot projects in the Chesapeake Bay watershed were funded through EPA’s Office of Research and Development to develop probabilistic wetland protocols on a watershed basis.  Both projects provided the framework for the methods developed in the Region and support state wetland monitoring program development.

The Nanticoke River Watershed Wetland Study  was a research project between the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the Nature Conservancy to determine the ecological health and function of freshwater non-tidal wetlands in the Nanticoke River watershed in Maryland and Delaware. 

The Juniata study, Development and Application of Assessment Protocols for Determining the Ecological Condition of Wetlands in the Juniata River Watershed , assessed the ecological condition of wetlands in the Juniata River watershed of central Pennsylvania.