Botany Photo of the Day

Beautiful! It is excellent to see such a fine example of restoration, and a fine photo, too.

Wow! Wonderful project, beautiful habitat.

Great job. With all due respect and admiration for this wonderfully improved landscape, I must remind us to look more closely. Please note the community structure here is, albeit a huge improvement, still indicative of instability. Typical of mitigation wetlands this site will denigrate rapidly, harboring a plethora of invasive r-selectors and non-natives, than rebound toward a new equilibrium and stability. This anthropogenic wetland will never replace the natural system we’ve destroyed. However, this will provide so much more then the tarmac and trash it was slated to become. Enjoy the cattails and mallards for now and celebrate the dynamics of the shifting mosaic progression toward a more natural system. Kudos to the restoration ecologists and their efforts.

Oh, so beautiful. Immediately to my Desktop. Such clear descriptions and charts. Am loving Research Week.

...it's so refreshing....to see intellegent..hard working people...developing bio-diverse systems...and yes jeff elliot...the natural course will be different 1000 years from now...but a project like this is similar to making bread...a little yeast makes the whole bread..

Very important work - maintaining healthy aquatic ecosystems in/around or urban areas is especially important. It is absolutely critical we get a handle on ecosystems' destruction, and begin to appreciate and valuate the free services they provide: clean water, flood control, erosion control, food, carbon/mercury/methane/etc. storage, and all of the spiritual and cultural values we find in them... Thank you for sharing this exciting research.

one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
with joyful interpnetration for all
gary snyder american 1930

this has been a lovely fine week
florida is trying to save itself if they ever
get out of the courts and each rain and storm
brings a change so many birds winter here or did
i do remember the meadowlands of new jersey
thank you this has been a grand week for all of us

wonderful yes, but too many will only see the mud and dead plants. We need a thousand Daniels to show them the beauty.

I am all for conservation, but construction and management of habitats, imo, must be done with care as habits/ecosystems/forest types are not static entities but change over time naturally due to succession, emigration, immigration, weather patterns and so forth. Part of the beauty of walking into a pine forest, for example is knowing that despite its present grandeur, the light-loving pines will eventually succumb under the canopy of oaks and hickories.

Lovely photo and very nice figures!

Thank you for this beautiful photo of the Maplewood mud flats in North Vancouver, and reminding me how truely vast and lovely this area is.

The site is well managed by the B.C. Wild Bird Trust. Since the wetland was installed the invasive purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) that previously dominated large areas of Maplewood Flats and would have overtaken the new wetland have been virtually eliminated.

Looks like a better than average mitigation, but many people assume that sites like this indicate that man can recreate wetlands with just a bit of work and money. This is hogwash. It's incredibly rare to have a mitigation site remain an active wetland for very many years after restoration. First, there is the tendency to plant willows, etc., around and in every body of water, which gives an instant transition to a late-successional wetland. Soils tend to build up quickly, and it's a wetland no more. The bigger problem though, in this regard, is the hydrology. Usually, water sources are in short supply, often due to hydrologic changes caused by the construction that leads to the mitigation. Without water, and without periodic flushing, a wetland is doomed to a late-successional state at best.