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Building a potential wetland restoration indictor for the U.S. EPA’s EnviroAtlas
Citation:
Horvath, E., J. Christensen, M. Mehaffey, AND A. Neale. Building a potential wetland restoration indictor for the U.S. EPA’s EnviroAtlas. US IALE, Ashville, NC, April 03 - 07, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
In this abstract we describe a new approach for determining the locations of potential wetland restorations within a watershed. The information has been incorporated into the EnviroAtlas as part of the national map application.
Description:
Wetland restoration has focused primarily on individual wetland creation, yet the greatest benefits have been achieved when restoration considers the watershed context. Identifying locations within a watershed that lend themselves to wetland restoration is key. We created an indicator of potential wetland areas (PWA), using nationally available data to identify characteristics that could support wetlands including: poorly drained soils and low-relief landscape positions. We then compared the National Wetland Inventory (NWI) from 11 states to our PWA to determine percent overlapped. The percentages of NWI inclusion directly overlapping the PWA ranged from 39-95% with an average of 81%. However, when we included NWI within 120m of overlapping wetlands the percentages increased to 61-100%. We then combined the national land cover database (NLCD) with our PWA indicator to identify agriculture lands amenable to wetland restoration (PRW-Ag). The PRW-Ag identified a total of over 46 million hectares with the potential to support wetlands. The largest concentrations of PRW-Ag occurred in the Upper Mississippi states from Ohio to the Dakotas and the Alluvial Mississippi Valley. The PRW-Ag layer could assist land managers in identifying sites that may qualify for enrollment in conservation programs, where planners can coordinate restoration efforts, or where decision makers can target resources to optimize the ecosystem services provided. We have made the PRW-Ag layer and numerous relevant companion layers, available in EPA’s EnviroAtlas (http://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas).
