DOVER – The seventh installment of DNREC’s “Wetlands 101” video series – “Freshwater Wetlands” – is now available for viewing on DNREC’s YouTube Channel. The series is produced by the Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Program within DNREC’s Division of Watershed Stewardship to educate Delawareans about wetlands, while promoting the idea that everyone can make a difference in the continuing challenge of wetland preservation.
In Delaware, freshwater wetlands make up roughly 75 percent of all wetlands, cleaning and replenishing our drinking waters, reducing flooding and providing food and shelter for all sorts of plants and animals. Most freshwater wetlands are forested and come in many different shapes, sizes and types.
The new “Freshwater Wetlands” video addresses just three of these types of freshwater wetlands found in Delaware: Bald cypress swamps, Coastal Plain ponds, and freshwater tidal marshes while distinguishing the difference between freshwater wetlands and their brackish or saltwater cousins. It also emphasizes that not all wetlands look like “wetlands” due to their ever-fluctuating nature where water levels rise and fall throughout the changing seasons.
There are many simple choices Delawareans can make to help preserve the state’s remaining freshwater wetlands and they include avoiding wet areas when building new construction or clearing land for agriculture, planting native plants and removing invasive ones, or leaving a planted buffer between open land and large ditch or waterway. For more information about Delaware’s wetlands, please visit de.gov/delawarewetlands.
In addition to the “Wetlands 101 Series,” the DNREC YouTube Channel offers more than 50 fun, interesting and educational videos, taking viewers from the unique steam car collection at Auburn Heights Preserve to the trails and pathways of Cape Henlopen State Park, and from the Delaware Bayshore to the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and many of the First State’s great outdoors places and spaces in between. Most of these videos are written and produced by DNREC’s Public Affairs Section.
To view “Freshwater Wetlands” and other DNREC YouTube Channel videos, please visit youtube.com/delawarednrec.
Media Contact: Michael Globetti, DNREC Public Affairs, 302-739-9902
Vol. 46, No. 430