4.1. What are the Implications of Changing Regulations for Wetland Protection in NYS?
The CWR and NWPR’s contrasting approaches to wetland protection result in clear disparities in the protection of wetlands. Across all hydrologic regions of NYS, the NWPR consistently protects fewer wetlands by both total area and number compared to the CWR (Figure 2). This finding is in close agreement with other studies that document decreased protections for wetlands moving from the CWR to NWPR at both state and watershed scales (Meyer & Robertson, 2019; Mihelcic & Rains, 2020; Walsh & Ward, 2019). The consequences of the NWPR on wetland protections are two-fold. First, the NWPR’s strict requirement of a surface-water connection between a wetland and another jurisdictional waterway, replacing the CWR’s framework of buffer distances, severely limits the total area of wetlands protected (Figure 2). Compounding those losses, the removal of the significant nexus test under the NWPR eliminates potential protections for a diverse subset of wetlands located at distance from the stream network. While the NWPR claims to simplify wetland regulation, it does so at the expense of lost protections for many NYS wetlands.
In NYS, we also observed considerable heterogeneity in wetland protections across hydrologic regions (Figure 2). Although statewide statistics of protection can be informative in the aggregate, they mask a wider range of extreme outcomes at smaller spatial scales. Between individual hydrologic regions of NYS, we found that the percent of jurisdictional area protected under the CWR and NWPR varied by up to 20.9% and 31.3%, respectively. This result emphasizes that federal regulations generate considerable spatial non-uniformity in wetland protections. Indeed, our documentation of spatial inconsistencies in protections highlights that the conservation of wetlands is a strongly regional issue. The efficacy of wetland regulation is likely tied to the distribution of wetlands on the landscape, which is controlled by gradients in topography, geology, subsurface flow, and climate at regional to continental scales (e.g., Bertassello et al., 2020). The patterns of wetland protection in New York, a state that spans a variety of Northeastern ecoregions, cannot be easily extrapolated to other areas of the US with dissimilar landscape characteristics and wetland distributions. This regional heterogeneity underscores the need for additional analyses of wetland policy in other diverse ecoregions of the US, furthering a more geographically comprehensive understanding of the implications of regulation.