Freshwater Basin Wetlands

Bogs, marshes, fens, wet meadows.

Much of the Northern Appalachian / Acadian region is soggy. Massive Holocene glaciers left behind a legacy of deranged drainage patterns forming over a million acres of marshes, mudflats, seeps, swamps and spongy bogs. These features are unevenly distributed across all subregions with the easternmost Acadian uplands and the Bras D'Or lowlands having more than the rest of the subregions combined.
Breeding populations of birds such as Virginia rail, yellow rail, American bittern, marsh wrens, black-crowned night heron and ring-necked duck, herptiles such as pickerel frog, northern dusky salamander and Blanding's turtle, a myriad of sedges, rushes, bladderworts, orchids, water-lilies, pondweeds and insects from darners to dusky-wings depend on these wetlands.

Key Results for Freshwater Wetlands

Based on the results of this analysis we recommend that 24% of the 1.3 million acres of wetlands be protected for biodiversity in a set of 568 critical wetland complexes. About ¼ of these are already on GAP 1 or 2 status lands.