湿地科学专业化解决了环境界的强烈意识，即湿地是许多较大的生态系统中至关重要且未被充分研究的组成部分。水生植物，水土和湿地水文学都使湿地成为重要且高度复杂的生态系统。除了对湿地的娱乐性和美学性做出了更明显的贡献外，它们还为鱼类和野生动植物提供栖息地，通过生物地球化学过程保护和改善水质，通过洪水蓄水机制提高了防洪能力，并提供了防止海岸线侵蚀的保护。在过去的二十年中，由于州和联邦法规以及对卡特里娜飓风等大规模环境问题的关注，湿地迅速引起了公众的关注。
The specialization in Wetland Science addresses the keen awareness among the Environmental community that wetlands represent a critical and understudied component of many larger ecosystems. Hydrophytic vegetation, hydric soils and wetland hydrology all contribute to make wetlands the significant and highly complex ecosystems that they are. In addition to the more obvious recreational and aesthetic contributions of wetlands, they provide fish and wildlife habitat, protect and enhance water quality through biogeochemical processes, increase flood protection through flood water storage mechanisms, and afford protection against shoreline erosion. Wetlands have rapidly gained public attention over the last two decades as they have been brought into the limelight by state and federal regulations and through the attention given such large scale environmental issues as hurricane Katrina.