Linking Water Treatment with Wetland Restoration - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 371

Treatment wetland parks ( sensu Bays et al. 2002) create aesthetic, educational,
and recreational opportunities. CH2MHILL has learned that public recreational use
of these created treatment wetland systems can exceed all expectations (Bays 2004).
In the Wakodahatchee wetlands project in Florida, for example (Bays 2002), the
boardwalk intersects all the zones within the wetland system, providing access to
the public from the inlet to the outlet of the system, and creating an element of explo-
ration and adventure for visitors at the same time as an opportunity for them to go
into the heart of the wetland that they would never have normally encountered. This
exceptional wetland project, which has been featured in local and national media,
has become extremely popular with visitors, the number of people on tours increas-
ing from 165 individuals in all of 1997 to over two thousand on just a single day
in 2004. As a result, the parking lot was recently expanded in size by a factor of
fivefold. Treatment wetlands which provide habitat for wildlife create a destination
for wildlife watchers which can actually be an economic attraction. And this linking
of tourism with water treatment is a truism in every wetland park (France 2003); in
other words, once you create these opportunities, people will use them, and they will
bring money with them (Bays 2004).
CASE STUDIES IN WATER TREATMENT
AND RESTORATION BENEFITS
The largest constructed treatment wetlands in the world are the 45,000 acres of sur-
face-flow wetlands that have been built over the last decade at a cost of over a billion
dollars to help restore the Everglades in southern Florida. The Everglades Nutrient
Removal Project is a thirty-eight-thousand-acre wetland constructed as a demonstra-
tion project and sized and located to treat the phosphorous-rich agricultural runoff
before it flows into what's left of the historic Everglades. Importantly, this project
provides a great model to learn from with respect to restoring and managing the
Iraqi marshes in that all the new treatment wetlands were built where the former
Everglades marshes had once existed (Bays 2004). This represents a good example
in which the remediation of water quality actually becomes part of the restoration
of the site. The treatment wetland is composed of four separate cells receiving over
160 million gallons a day of inflow with phosphorous concentrations of 100 µg/L
and with a target outflow concentration of 25 µg/L. This project is the kind of scale
that needs to be thought about in Iraq, where wetlands there have already been really
reflooded due to dike breaching. Bays (2004) believes that if redevelopment projects
in Iraq are too small in scale, some of the larger scale phenomena necessary for
sustainable restoration will be missed. And it is critically important to include resi-
dents in the decision making. The award-winning Wakodahatchee wetlands project
in one of the most densely populated areas of southeast Florida, for example (Bays
2002), shows that people can cohabitate beside and make public use of such treat-
ment wetland marshes. Such wetlands therefore operate as “green infrastructure” in
regenerative landscape design (France 2008).
Other projects, though much smaller in scale than the Florida example, are useful
to examine given their location in arid regions. One such case study in the city of