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Delineation of Nested Wetland Catchments and Modeling of Hydrologic Connectivity Using LiDAR Data and Aerial Imagery
Citation:
Wu, Q. AND C. Lane. Delineation of Nested Wetland Catchments and Modeling of Hydrologic Connectivity Using LiDAR Data and Aerial Imagery. American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA, December 12 - 16, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
Poster on connectivity science from SSWR 3.01G for AGU Fall Meeting
Description:
In traditional watershed delineation and topographic modelling, surface depressions are generally treated as spurious features and simply removed from a digital elevation model (DEM) to enforce flow continuity of water across the topographic surface to the watershed outlets. In reality, however, many depressions in the DEM are actual wetland landscape features that are seldom fully filled with water. For instance, wetland depressions in the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) are seasonally to permanently flooded wetlands characterized by nested hierarchical structures with dynamic filling-spilling-merging surface-water hydrological processes. The objectives of this study were to delineate nested wetland catchments and model their hydrologic connectivity using high-resolution LiDAR data. The graph theory-based contour tree method was used to delineate the hierarchical wetland catchments and characterize their geometric and topological properties. Hydrologic connectivity between wetlands and streams were simulated under various rainfall conditions. The derived flow network successfully captured those temporary or seasonal flow paths that were generally not available in the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) of the PPR. The results demonstrated that our proposed framework is promising for improving overland flow modeling and hydrologic connectivity analysis.
