HOUGHTON – Michigan Tech professor Rod Chimner has been involved in wetlands research and restoration around the U.S. and the world before returning to his native Michigan. The U.P.’s wetlands, he said, are in relatively good shape.

“There aren’t a lot of screwed-up wetlands here,” he said. “I have to go to other places to fix wetlands.”

Much of his wetlands restoration work, he said, has actually been in Minnesota, trying to disprove an old cedar-clearing adage that “when you cut them, they won’t grow back.”

It’s not easy, he said, describing one replanting project that had just a 50 percent cedar survival rate after two years. Many seedlings appear to have drowned, he said, either because foresters planted them in dry spots that flooded when the water table changed, or because they planted roots straight down – standard practice – instead of sidewise along the surface, as they tend to grow naturally.

“I think we just stuck them down into the groundwater, and they died,” Chimer said.

Protecting existing swamps by building roads to allow for natural water flow and blocking ditches that inadvertently drain swamps has been more effective, he said.

In Michigan, Chimner said, his work has focused more on research than remediation.

One project, he said, studied the potential effects of climate change on marshes and took place at a large marsh at the base of the tiny Pequaming peninsula on Keweenaw Bay. Tech researchers set up large heat lights in the swamp to raise surface temperature in some plots by a few degrees, he said, and recorded the effects over time.

One group in the audience was especially interest in that research. They were from an ecology class at Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community, where they attend school just a few miles from the Peqauming marsh. Most were members of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, a group that traditionally considers cedar one of its four sacred medicines and considers all wetlands important, according to professor Andrew Kozich.

“We rely on it more than other people – more directly,” agreed class member Tara Smith.