5.0. Conclusion
The regulatory definition of WOTUS has been the source of a litany of
lawsuits and repeated debates over rulemaking related to federal
wetlands protection. While interpretations of environmental policy will
always require judgment on a case-by-case basis, analyses like ours
present a broad-scale assessment of the changes that will be realized on
the landscape as a function of changing federal rules. Key findings of
our study include:
- In comparison to the CWR, the NWPR decreases the total area and number
of wetlands protected in New York State. State-wide, we estimate that
the NWPR protects 11.6% less total wetland area than the CWR, with a
potential for greater losses in protection depending on the evaluation
of the CWR’s significant nexus test.
- The impacts of regulatory change on wetland protections are highly
variable across regions (e.g., HUC-by-HUC differences within a single
state as shown here). As such, we discourage the extrapolation of
watershed-scale policy outcomes to broader regions and suggest that a
comprehensive approach is necessary to understand regulatory impacts.
- Federal wetland regulation can result in a non-uniform distribution of
protections across the landscape. With its use of a surface water
connection as criteria for jurisdiction, the NWPR preferentially
protects larger wetlands close to the stream network, leaving smaller
and more geographically isolated wetlands particularly vulnerable. The
loss of these unprotected, non-floodplain wetlands could result in a
considerable decline in ecosystem function, given their unique
biological and chemical functions.