Wetlands are usually defined by three criteria: periodic or continuous soil inundation or saturation, soils that have developed under anaerobic conditions (i.e., hydric soils), and vegetation that is adapted to anaerobic conditions (i.e., hydrophytic vegetation). If hydric soils do not develop, plants suitable for or characteristic of wetland environments may not successfully colonize or persist.  A persistent question among ecologists and environmental managers has been whether constructed wetlands are structurally or functionally equivalent to naturally-occurring wetlands.  Variables measuring physical and chemical properties of wetland soils appear to be excellent candidates for addressing this question.  We examined 19 variables collected from 10 constructed and nine natural emergent wetlands in Ohio, USA.  Our primary objective was to identify indicators of natural or constructed wetlands (natural or constructed), based on measurements of soil properties and an index of vegetation integrity, for use in mitigation monitoring.  These indicators would then be candidates for long-term monitoring to track the progress of constructed wetlands toward a natural state.  We use a statistical technique that is new to environmental science--the method of nearest shrunken centroids (MNSC)--to find a subset of variables that would serve as the best classifiers of wetland class.  Error rate was calculated using a five-fold cross-validation procedure.  The shrunken differences of percent total organic carbon (%TOC) and percent solids (%solids) exhibited the greatest distances from the overall centroid.  Classification based on these two variables yielded a misclassification rate of 11% based on cross-validation.  Our results suggest that %TOC and %solids can be used as candidate indicators of the status of emergent-vegetation wetlands and can be used to assess the performance of mitigation.  The MNSC has excellent potential for further applications in ecology, soil science, and environmental management.