By mid-October, the Baker Wetlands will be humming with the sounds of machinery.
The machines will be used to convert about 142 acres of farm ground west of Louisiana Street between 31st Street and the Wakarusa River into new wetlands.
“We’re just about ready to go,” Director of Natural Areas Roger Boyd said. “We’re just waiting for the corn to be cut.”
University President Pat Long said the expansion of the wetlands will have great educational and environmental impacts.
“What it means for Baker is increased opportunities for both our students and the community to experience the wetlands and what that means,” she said.
Boyd and Baker alumnus Mark Wellendorf, acting refuge manager, have been gathering millions of seeds in preparation for planting the area next spring after they prepare the ground this fall. Although the farm ground will be dug up and moved around, no part of Baker’s current 573 acres of wetlands will be destroyed.
Boyd said the Kansas Department of Transportation bought the ground about seven years ago, but has been leasing it to farmers until the Federal Highway Administration finalized plans on the South Lawrence Trafficway earlier this year. What is considered the 32nd Street Alignment, will connect Kansas Highway 10 east from its 35th Street intersection on Iowa Street, to the existing K-10 near Noria Road and also cut through 56 acres of Baker Wetlands at its northern edge.
The restoration of wetlands is part of a mitigation plan required by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which Boyd has no doubt will be a success.
“Environmentalists believe that it makes no sense to destroy current wetlands with the assumption that you can create these to be just as good as what you have now,” he said. “But a lot of people forget the history of the Baker wetlands, and that is that when we got it 40 years ago, 80 percent of it was farm ground. It was corn, wheat, beans, some of it was pasture; it wasn’t wetlands. The reason it’s wetlands now is because I’ve restored it to wetlands. So I know that you can do this.”
Although mitigation has begun to make up for the potential loss of 56 acres of current wetlands, a timeline as to when actual construction on the SLT will begin is unknown, KDOT Engineering Manager Corky Armstrong said, because no funding for it exists until the 2009 Kansas Legislature meets to discuss a new transportation bill.
“We’ve got all the documentation, but we just don’t have the funding,” he said.
Baker is receiving $975,000 from KDOT for the mitigation project, which stems from a $1.5 million federal earmark Sen. Pat Roberts set aside for continued development of the SLT in 2005, but which is too small to fund development of the road itself.
The funds will be used to finance things such as trails extending from the parking area, a boardwalk to the edge of the existing pond, which is being expanded and will house a water control structure, information kiosk, a picnic pavilion, several benches and equipment costs, as well as materials for the conversion of a silo into an observation deck by architecture students from the University of Kansas.
“We’ll renegotiate that with (KU) and see if they’re still interested,” Boyd said.
Because a majority of the area is flat and doesn’t drain, little swells and shallows anywhere from 6 inches to 18 inches deep will be created to allow for irregular pattern flows for when the river floods. That dirt will then be transferred to create a levy paralleling Louisiana Street and another one paralleling 1250 North.
“If we didn’t do this, and we just built the wetlands out there, standing on the levy you would see straight lines of vegetation or open water and it would look very artificial,” Boyd said. “Our attempt here is to try to get rid of that artificial pattern and make it look very irregular, which is basically what nature would have.”
Boyd said planting won’t begin until March or April, but will include bidens, the major flower monarchs feed on, as well as sedges, rushes and many other wetland plants, all of which will be monitored closely.
“It will probably be somewhat weedy the first year, but I think the second year we’ll start to see very good conditions, and by the third year it should be pretty well-established,” he said.
Boyd said people tend to think of open water with cattails when picturing wetlands, however, the restored acres will actually be wet meadow wetlands, which are more vegetative, drying up in the summer and gaining moisture during the winter and into the spring.
