Washington ? The Bush administration adopted a new plan and guidelines Thursday for replacing swamps and bogs that have been filled or drained to make way for highway, housing or other projects.

Administration officials said their approach, based on input from six agencies, would not diminish the role of wetlands in providing habitat to wildlife, flood control and water quality.

They said the focus would be on the quality of new wetlands being created, rather than the traditional emphasis on maintaining total wetlands acreage.

“These actions affirm this administration’s commitment to the goal of no net loss of America’s wetlands and its support for protecting our nation’s watersheds,” said Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The administration will require “no net loss” of wetlands among the Army Corps of Engineers’ 38 U.S. districts rather than acre-for-acre restoration on each project, according to Benjamin Grumbles, a deputy assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Water. The districts overseen by the corps, the nation’s Pentagon-based construction agency, follow watersheds rather than state boundaries.

EPA spokesman Joe Martyak said the first priority was preventing wetlands losses. The administration will continue to emphasize that wetlands being created should be similar to what they are intended to replace, he said.

But he said the underlying needs of a watershed would be weighed more heavily than whether there was a net loss of acreage.

“It’s not just acre-for-acre,” Martyak said of the new approach. In some cases, he said, regulators may find that “it’s a numerical loss, but it’s an ecological gain.”