Successful design and construction of wetlands, with Tom Biebighauser

One of the most crucial natural environments for the health and stability of landscape hydrology are wetlands. They also usually happen to be areas of the highest density of wildlife and biodiversity when they are healthy and functioning well. At the same time wetlands in all their different forms are highly endangered, being the targets for milenia of drainage and infill in order to make use of them for cultivation. Yet recovering and rebuilding wetlands is not only possible, it can be an affordable and context appropriate way of regenerating the health of entire water catchments as well. Here to shed light on the topic of wetland construction and design is Tom Biebighauser, the founder of Wetland Restoration and Training LLC which was was established in 2014 with the mission of encouraging and helping people to build naturally appearing and functioning wetlands.

Tom had heard from many landowners and natural resource managers that it was almost impossible for someone to learn how to build a wetland, and that actually building wetlands was extremely expensive. To make matters worse, the few people building wetlands were using techniques with a success rate of less than 50-percent.

Tom learned how to build wetlands, streams, ponds, and lakes the hard way through trial and error. Building his first wetlands in Minnesota in 1979 while working for the US Forest Service, he has since built thousands of wetlands. Less than one-half of the early wetlands he built held water as planned. Over time, through much anguish and relentless work, he developed innovative techniques for constructing wetlands that are consistently 100-percent successful and low cost.

Tom Biebighauser has been enthusiastically restoring wetlands, lakes, streams, and rivers since 1979. He has designed over 10,000 wetland projects and has successfully supervised the construction of over 3,000 wetlands and streams in 26-states, 3-Canadian provinces, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, and Taiwan.

Tom enjoys leading workshops where participants can learn about wetland restoration by designing and constructing wetlands from start to finish.

Tom has developed highly successful and inexpensive techniques for restoring wetlands and streams that should last forever without maintenance and that provide habitat for endangered and threatened species.

In this interview Tom and I go into quite a lot of detail about wetlands, covering the range of configurations and biomes they appear in, and how prominent and integral to landscape health they have been in areas we now consider arid and degraded. We explore the criteria for selecting a wetland construction site, as well as the design criteria and process in order for it to fit well and function in any landscape.

Tom also explains the all important maintenance and monitoring process once the wetland is installed and we even explore the unique opportunities that exist to integrate wetlands into farms, schools, communities, and many other managed landscapes that have traditionally drained and dismantled wetlands in the past. This episode is going to kick off a series of water focused episodes, some of which I’m bringing back from the archives because there are many new listeners who haven’t heard them and they’re worth revisiting, and new conversations as well as I look into the specific context of water management challenges and potential here in Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. I also have some exciting announcements that will be rolling out at selected intervals throughout this series. It’s still a little early to say, but I can tell you that if you’re passionate about supporting regional scale water regeneration and the possibility of turning this type of work into a career, then be sure to stay up to date during this run.