FWS Submissions

Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and the  FWS are collaborating to develop a multi-sensor, multi-frequency remote sensing approach to mapping and monitoring wetlands for the Great Lakes coastline and basin. One of the main purposes of this project is to prepare for the upcoming launch of the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) by determining how simulated compact polarimetry can be used to map and monitor ephemeral coastal wetlands with multitemporal submeter optical satellite imagery.

Vegetation structure raster layers developed from lidar data are used in a variety of resource management applications. The ongoing lidar analysis from the USGS QL2 data collected in North Carolina has been expanded to an analysis of 360 billion lidar points over 60 counties, producing rasters at a 20-ft (6.096-m) horizontal resolution. Structure layers include canopy height, lidar Z value skewness, percent of lidar points 1–3 m aboveground, and percent of points 3–7 m aboveground.

The Bill Williams River is a tributary to the lower Colorado River and maintains one of the few examples of naturally regenerating cottonwood-willow gallery forest in the region. Gallery forest provides habitat for the endangered Southwest Willow Flycatcher (Empidonax traillii extimus) and other important waterfowl, mammal, and amphibian species. Tree mortality and dieback of cottonwoods (Populus spp.), willows (Salix spp.), and saltcedar (Tamarix spp.) have increased within the riparian corridor since 2013 and become widespread in 2016.

As part of a larger Great Lakes Restoration Initiative - Remote Sensing project led by the FWS, Jim Klassen with SharedGeo automatically derived 2-m vegetation surface canopy digital elevation models from stereo submeter optical satellite imagery using the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters supercomputer.  This is one early example where imagery was compared to previous models derived from digital stereo aerial imagery and lidar imagery.