DATE: Sunday, September 21, 1997            TAG: 9709210065

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A11  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   38 lines

WETLANDS CONTINUE TO VANISH DESPITE POLICIES, U.S. SAYS

More than 1 million acres of U.S. wetlands vanished from 1985 to 1995, a period when the government imposed tough new protections for the threatened ecosystems and set a national goal of ending the losses, the Clinton administration estimated last week.

Half of those losses were in the forested wetlands of the Southeast.

In the first comprehensive survey of wetlands to be published since 1990, and the first to try to show the effects of the new policies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that during the decade, wetlands disappeared at an average rate of 117,000 acres a year. The administration has been saying the losses in recent years were considerably less than that, though the precise figures were not available.

The agency called the report good news, saying it showed that the rate of loss had steadily declined over the past four decades. In the decade studied, new policies under federal clean-water and agriculture laws were just beginning to take hold, agency officials said. In the previous decade, wetland losses amounted to nearly 3 million acres.

Jamie Clark, director of the wildlife agency, said: ``It is my hope that 10 years from now my successor will be able to stand here and tell you that we have finally achieved our no-net-loss goal.''

Even so, the decline from 1985 to 1995 amounted to about 1 percent of the wetlands that remain in the lower 48 states, which have now lost more than half the wetlands that existed in Colonial times.

The estimate showed surprisingly large losses on agricultural lands, and suggested that ending losses altogether remains elusive.

Wetlands are considered essential partly because they filter contaminants from water and are a sponge for heavy rains that otherwise would cause damaging floods. KEYWORDS: WETLANDS STATISTICS

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