By Kieran Mulvaney – Discovery News

After sea levels retreated about 4,000 years ago the exposed wetlands provided a new habitat for biodiversity. Recently, much effort has been made to protect the remaining coastal marshes in North America. If the goal of that protection is for example, maintaining barriers to storm surges and providing wildlife refuges, then understanding how the marshes were formed and maintained is critical. If the goal is to return the land to it's "natural" state, then the history of the marshes, at least for some, may come as a surprise. Logging of forests in the 1700s and 1800s may have been responsible for creating some of the coastal wetlands in New England, notes Matthew Kirwan of the U.S. Geological Survey. For full story, click here.