Wetlands were formally widespread in England and Wales. However, due to intensification of agricultural practices, the true wetland habitat has undergone serious decline both in terms of numbers and ecological diversity. Many Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) now employ management prescriptions to maintain or re-create wetland habitats in an attempt to ensure their long-term survival. In order that these wetlands are managed appropriately the need to develop and implement effective management strategies that reconcile agricultural requirements with individual wetland habitat objectives is paramount. ADAS together with the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) have been commissioned to formulate wetland management policies targeted at restoring and enhancing wetlands within ESAs .This paper describes a Wetlands GIS which has been developed as a decision support tool to assist in the formulation of these policies. The implications of altered water management regimes have been integrated and modelled with ecological, ornithological, and agricultural requirements for four catchments containing wetland areas. The potential effects of water level fluctuations on the faunal and floral communities have been determined. Developments undertaken to integrate these components will be described and results presented for the Marsh Gibbon area on the River Ray in the Upper Thames Tributaries ESA near Oxford. The wetland management policies recommended as a result of using the Wetlands GIS to predict different management effects in each of the four catchments and comparisons between catchments will be outlined.
The Kissimmee River Save Our Rivers Project undertaken by the State of Florida's South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) is one of the State's more important water resource restoration projects. The SFWMD Save Our Rivers Program and Preservation 2000 will restore approximately twenty-five miles of the original Kissimmee River channel and over twenty-five square miles of floodplain wetlands. One of the goals for both the Save Our Rivers and Preservation 2000 programs is that the Kissimmee River and associated lands will be used for public recreation while not degrading the natural resources of the site. As landscape architects and lead consultants for the project, we had the unique opportunity to work with various professionals to develop a methodology for the inventory and analysis of what will be the post-restoration conditions of the Kissimmee River ecosystem. While utilizing ArcInfo and polygon overlay, we developed a methodology to rate the site's vulnerability to resource-based recreation. From this analysis, we developed a process and guideline for land use and public recreation. The purpose of this paper and presentation is to introduce and describe the project's scope and goals, describe the methodology utilized for the inventory and analysis process, illustrate and describe the maps generated by ArcInfo during the analysis process, and present the resulting Conceptual Land Use and Natural Resources Guideline for public recreation.
Pacific Meridian Resources developed GIS models to facilitate the selection of waterfowl habitat restoration sites and to evaluate progress toward meeting waterfowl habitat goals. Pacific Meridian Resources, NAWMP Central Valley Habitat Joint Venture (CVHJV), California Department of Fish and Game, California Wildlife Conservation Board, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are partners in this inventory project, which integrates satellite imagery and GIS analysis. The project was developed to help guide wetland restoration programs in California and has application potential nationwide. A variety of factors such as manmade alterations, changes in legislation, periods of prolonged drought, and intense flood have greatly affected the abundance and functioning of wetlands systems throughout the United States. The objectives of this project are to facilitate the selection of waterfowl habitat restoration sites and to evaluate progress towards meeting waterfowl habitat goals as set forth by the CVHJV. The objectives were addressed as two separate models. Satellite images collected from two seasons in 1993 were processed to inventory wetlands and other land covers in the Central Valley of California. The results of this inventory were incorporated into the Energenics Model, which calculates the waterfowl carrying capacity of an area based on land cover acreages from satellite imagery land cover inventories and user defined waterfowl energenics variables. The calculated carrying capacity is then evaluated against the CVHJV goals. The second model is the Waterfowl Habitat Restoration Site Suitability Model. In this model the user is presented with a number of data layers that can be incorporated into a habitat restoration model. The user selects the data layers to use and interactively recodes or weights the layers as desired. These recoded layers are then additively combined to produce an output site suitability map. Techniques used in this analysis are applicable for monitoring changes in similarly affected areas, such as, the Mississippi River Alluvial Plain which recently experienced severe flooding and significant changes to riverine wetlands and surrounding agricultural land.
Wetland delineation is a problematic issue for governmental regulators. Remotely sensed data, particularly aerial photographs, are important for mapping wetlands at regional scales. A variety of new digital remote sensing technologies (e.g., medium- to high-resolution multiband satellite and airborne imagery of visible, near-infrared, mid-infrared, thermal, and radar spectral regions) may improve National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) mapping efforts by increasing map accuracy and reducing map production costs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and NASA's Commercial Remote Sensing Program Office, in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, conducted a study to evaluate the utility of commercially available remotely sensed imagery for deriving wetland classification and mapping products for the NWI. This paper will discuss GIS techniques used to assist the aforementioned investigation. In the EPA study, each remotely sensed data set was processed into wetness maps and compared with NWI maps and GPS-based field survey data. GIS tools found in ArcInfo software proved to be indispensable for quantifying and visualizing comparisons of test and reference wetness maps. GISs also assisted in wetness signature evaluation and development by enabling analysts to cross-tabulate unsupervised classifications of remotely sensed data with NWI wetness maps.