Abstract

Mapping Wetland Features from IFSAR in the Prairie Pothole Region
Track: Water Resources
Authors: Janet Gritzner, Bruce Millett

The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of the US and Canada is ranked number 1 on the list of threatened waterfowl habitats on the continent.
Detailed wetland mapping and characterization is prerequisite for wetland protection, management, and restoration. Mapping of the PPR wetlands in the NWI was completed by late 1980s and converted into digital datasets by early 1990s. Wetland features in the PPR have changed considerably in size, shape, water regime, and vegetative stage since the 1980s.
This research looks at rule-based, GIS and remote sensing methodologies for producing detailed map datasets intended to update and enhance the NWI. This work uses airborne Interfermetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (IFSAR) 2005 data products as core datasets: (5-meter Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) and 1.25 meter Orthorectified Radar Imagery (ORI)) to extract and characterize wetland features. Major processing steps entail identifying wetland depressions, extracting vegetation signatures, cleaning up of the data, and merging results.