Under the bill, developers could fill up to an acre of urban wetlands without a permit if the activity doesn't disturb a high-quality wetland. The bill defines urban wetlands as wetlands that lie within a half-mile of an incorporated area or an area with a sewer system.

Steineke and Senate President Roger Roth introduced a bill last fall that would have let developers fill state wetlands without a DNR permit. Builders still would have had to abide by compensation requirements in state law: create 1.2 wetland acres for every acre destroyed, purchase credits from a mitigation bank or pay into a DNR fund for restoring wetlands.

Sodden with amateurishness, "Wetlands" attempts to turn Atlantic City in December into a noir nexus of drug-dealing surfers, struggling moms and broken cops, but instead merely claims a handful of good actors as unfortunate victims. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje glowers painfully as Babs, a disgraced, recovering-addict detective on a last-chance posting in a desolate stretch of New Jersey waterfront he once called home. His new partner is a loutish drunk (Christopher McDonald) with a disillusioned anchorwoman (Jennifer Ehle) for a wife. Obsessed with reconnecting with his teenage daughter (Celeste O'Connor), Babs sees trouble in his surf shop owner ex-wife (Heather Graham) hooking up with an unnamed surfer girl (Reyna de Courcy) who sells dope for a lowlife called Jimmy Coconuts (Louis Mustillo). In fashionista-turned-filmmaker Emanuele Della Valle's nonsensical screenplay, the embarrassing "tough" dialogue is somehow both needlessly oblique and glaringly obvious at the same time, leaving accomplished performers looking like motivation-challenged hostages waiting for the words "It's a wrap."

Annapolis, MD – Chesapeake Conservancy's data science team developed an artificial intelligence deep learning model for mapping wetlands, which resulted in 94% accuracy. Supported by EPRI, an independent, non-profit energy research and development institute; Lincoln Electric System; and the Grayce B. Kerr Fund, Inc., this method for wetland mapping could deliver important outcomes for protecting and conserving wetlands. The results are published in the peer-reviewed journal Science of the Total Environment. The team trained a machine learning (convolutional neural network) model for high-resolution (1m) wetland mapping with freely available data from three areas: Mille Lacs County, Minnesota; Kent County, Delaware; and St. Lawrence County, New York. The full model, which requires local training data provided by state wetlands data and the National Wetlands Inventory (NWI), mapped wetlands with 94% accuracy.

The bill would eliminate the Department of Natural Resources wetland development permit system. Builders would still have to create 1.2 acres of new wetlands for every acre filled, just as they do now.