Northern Virginia:
“A hemi-marsh is a shallow wetland with water levels that
change seasonally. It’s not a lake. The ideal hemi-marsh — ‘hemi’ means ‘half’
— is 50 percent water and 50 percent plants, a combination that provides
biodiversity, a healthful balance for a wide variety of local native plants and
animals.
Huntley Meadows Park, which has the largest nontidal
wetlands in Northern Virginia, just completed a project to bring back the
hemi-marsh ecosystem that beavers created there in the 1970s…
Over the years, this huge natural area south of Alexandria
became surrounded by roads and houses. That development caused tons of silt
(small particles of rock and soil) to flow into the wetlands, reducing the
water’s depth by one-third, destroying habitats and encouraging silt-loving
plants such as cattails to take over, crowding out other plants.”
~Writes Ann Cameron Siegal of the Washington Post
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