The wetlands’ significance for improving water quality and providing important ecological, recreational and commercial aquatic habitats has resulted in legislation designed to protect and restore this valuable resource. Yet when the first version of the Clean Water Act passed in the 1970s, 117 million acres of wetlands, approximately one-half of those in the continental United States, had been destroyed or radically altered from their natural state. The discipline charged with reversing this trend is called Restoration Ecology.

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