Abstract

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Paper
Modeling with HEAT in the Everglades Restoration Project
Track: Modeling
Author(s): Steve Schubert, Paul Harkins, Barry Wharton, Stephanie Morse

The Lake Okeechobee Watershed Project, a component of the ongoing federal Everglades restoration program, seeks to reduce phosphorus loading to Lake Okeechobee while minimizing impacts to wildlife habitat. Given the project's size (more than one million acres) and aggressive implementation schedule, we needed a tool to rapidly assess wildlife habitat value and quantify impacts of proposed alternatives. A conceptual wetland/upland habitat assessment developed by an interagency planning team and simplified from an established wetland assessment technique was then converted to a fully-functional GIS-based desktop application. The application, called the Habitat Evaluation Assessment Tool (HEAT), was created using the ArcGIS ModelBuilder. Using ModelBuilder reduced the run time of the model from approximately 489 hours of manual interpretation and fieldwork to 23 minutes of model runtime, saving thousands of dollars each time the HEAT model was run. Without ModelBuilder, completion of this task would have been next to impossible.

Steve Schubert
USFWS
Ecological Services
1339 20th Street
Vero Beach , FL 32960
US
Phone: 772-562-3909
Fax: 772-562-4288
E-mail: Steve_Schubert@fws.gov

Paul Harkins
HDR Engineering
Natural Sciences
2200 Westshore Blvd
Suite 250
Tampa , FL 33607
US
Phone: 813.282.2468
Fax: 813.282.2498
E-mail: Paul.Harkins@hdrinc.com

Barry Wharton
HDR Engineering
Natural Sciences
2200 Westshore Blvd
Suite 250
Tampa , FL 33607
US
Phone: 813.282.2360
Fax: 813.282.2498
E-mail: Barry.Wharton@hdrinc.com

Stephanie Morse
HDR Engineering
Natural Sciences
2202 West Shore Blvd
Suite 250
Tampa , FL 33607-5755
US
Phone: 813.262.2452
E-mail: Stephanie.Morse@hdrinc.com