The Everglades National Park (EVER) and Big Cypress National Preserve (BICY) vegetation mapping project is part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, a cooperative effort between the South Florida Water Management District, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and the NPS Vegetation Mapping Inventory Program (VMI). The goal of this project is to produce a spatially and thematically accurate vegetation map of these two park units prior to the completion of restoration efforts.
The project covers an area of approximately 7,400 square kilometers (1.84 million acres) and consists of seven mapping regions: four regions in EVER, 1 through 4, and three regions in BICY, 5 through 7. Photo-interpretation is performed by superimposing a 50 x 50-meter (¼-hectare) grid cell vector matrix over stereoscopic color infrared aerial imagery on a digital photogrammetric workstation. Photo-interpreters identify the dominant community in each cell by applying majority rule algorithms, recognizing community specific spectral signatures, and referencing an extensive ground-truth database.
Work on the project is near completion and all regions have been mapped. Regions 2–7 are available for download from the NPS Integrated Resource Management Applications (IRMA) Portal at https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2278515. Quality assurance and quality control for Region 1 is available for download in the USACE EVER Region 1 report at https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/utils/getfile/collection/p16021coll7/id/16045. Project support comes from the NPS VIP and the USACE.
https://www.nps.gov/im/sfcn/vegetation-mapping.htm
Footprint of the Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve vegetation mapping project showing mapping regions and completed mapping areas.