We at Klamath Wetland Education and Reseach Institute (KWERI) are building an organization to draw attention to The Upper Klamath Basin Wetlands. We will focus on area wetlands to generate awareness and interest in this unique habitat. We hope that an increased awareness will lead to better stewardship and greater support for preservation and restoration efforts.

By the late Twentieth Century, the wetlands of the Klamath Basin had been reduced to approximately 20% of the area that they occupied prior to the arrival of white settlers to this region approximately 200 years ago. The natives of the region drew much of their sustenance from these wetlands, using the plants, mammals, birds and fishes for everything from food to clothing to transportation to shelter.

When white pioneers arrived, they too took advantage of many of the benefits of the wetlands. However, toward the end of the Nineteenth Century and then in full force through the Twentieth Century, the wetlands were not appreciated for their intrinsic value, but rather seen as land to be reclaimed from the marshes and put to work for agricultural uses. This was an era where our country and much of the developed world exploited newly found technical and engineering expertise to expand the extraction economy at a great rate. Major changes came to many areas based upon our newfound abilities to redistribute water. We made what had been deserts into fertile agricultural basins and drained millions of acres of wetlands to produce yet more valuable farmland.

Now, at the dawning of the Twenty-first Century, we are coming to understand the many benefits these wetlands can provide for humans and for the ecosystem, in general, if managed more conservatively for those benefits. Now we must try to balance those values against the obvious value of agricultural land uses to come to the right balance. Clearly we must produce food to feed ourselves, and we must have ag lands to do this. But how much of the benefit of the wetlands can we surrender toward this end while still retaining sufficient function to meet our other needs?

For now we're focusing on the wetland at the North end of the Upper Klamath Lake. Some of the benefits that wetlands can provide for the Upper Klamath Basin include:

• Habitat for endangered juvenile suckers
• Stored water for Agriculture
• Slowing of Floodwaters.
• Habitat for birds on Pacific Flyway
• Capture of excess nutrients from agricultural land (e.g. nitrogen & phosphorous)
• Slowed nutrient release from the soils and decaying vegetative matter.

Our wetlands can be thought of as the kidneys of the Earth. Properly functioning, our wetlands will help us capture nutrients released from our agricultural and other operations and fix them as biomass. Otherwise, these nutrients would be released to the air and water to provide excessive feed to build biomass in less ideal ways, such as algal blooms that might foul our lakes and streams. Help us strike this balance by maintaining healthy wetlands.