Abstract
 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 |
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