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Riparian Wetlands: Mapping
Citation:
Hychka, Kristen C. Riparian Wetlands: Mapping. Chapter N/A, Encyclopedia of Natural Resources: Water. Taylor and Francis, Philadelphia, PA, , 826-830, (2014).
Impact/Purpose:
Riparian wetlands provide a suite of services including flood protection, baseflow maintenance, and support for biodiversity. However, some current mapping techniques leave out many riparian wetlands, because of their morphology, hydrology, and cover. This encyclopedia entry provides a review of the strengths and weaknesses of current riparian wetland mapping approaches. This information should be useful to scientists (particularly earth system modelers and wetland ecologists) building models and designing field studies and to managers and planners seeking to maximize ecosystem benefits in their municipality or watershed.
Description:
Riparian wetlands are critical systems that perform functions and provide services disproportionate to their extent in the landscape. Mapping wetlands allows for better planning, management, and modeling, but riparian wetlands present several challenges to effective mapping due to their morphology, size, forest cover, and relative dryness. There are three general approaches to mapping riparian wetlands using on-site, remotely sensed, or ancillary data. These approaches all have tradeoffs in terms of time, cost, accuracy (omission and commission), and repeatability. However, there are promising approaches to improve the accuracy of mapping riparian wetlands, particularly through radar, LiDAR intensity returns, multi-temporal images, process mapping, and mixed methods approaches.