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.