Mask to hide intermittent inundation - Louisiana [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service]
Description
Mask to hide intermittent inundation - Louisiana. Used in conjunction with other layers to evaluate the accuracy of a statewide (Louisiana) assessment of habitat suitable for alligator gar spawning using the techniques described in Allen et. al 2020. Allen, Y., K. Kimmel, and G. Constant. 2020. Using Remote Sensing to Assess Alligator Gar Spawning Habitat Suitability in the Lower Mississippi River. North American Journal of Fisheries Management 40:580-594.Inundation Extent was developed using techniques presented in Allen (2016). Allen, Y. 2016. Landscape Scale Assessment of Floodplain Inundation Frequency Using Landsat Imagery. River Research and Applications 32:1609-1620.In large river ecosystems, the timing, extent, duration and frequency of floodplain inundation greatly affect the quality of fish and wildlifehabitat and the supply of important ecosystem goods and services. Seasonal high flows provide connectivity from the river to the floodplain,and seasonal inundation of the floodplain governs ecosystem structure and function. River regulation and other forms of hydrologic alterationhave altered the connectivity of many rivers with their adjacent floodplain - impacting the function of wetlands on the floodplain and in turn,impacting the mainstem river function. Conservation and management of remaining floodplain resources can be improved through a betterunderstanding of the spatial extent and frequency of inundation at scales that are relevant to the species and/or ecological processes of interest.Spatial data products describing dynamic aspects floodplain inundation are, however, not widely available. This study used Landsatimagery to generate multiple observations of inundation extent under varying hydrologic conditions to estimate inundation frequency. Inundationextent was estimated for 50 Landsat scenes and 1334 total images within the Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks Landscape ConservationCooperative (GCPO LCC), a conservation science partnership working in a 730 000-km2 region in the south central USA. These data werecomposited into a landscape mosaic to depict relative inundation frequency over the entire GCPO LCC. An analytical methodology is presentedfor linking the observed inundation extent and frequency with long-term gage measurements so that the outcomes may be useful indefining meaningful critical thresholds for a variety of floodplain dependent organisms as well as important ecological processes. Published2015. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA
Department of the Interior (2021). Mask to hide intermittent inundation - Louisiana [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service]. . https://gis-fws.opendata.arcgis.com/maps/fws::mask-to-hide-intermittent-inundation-louisiana (web service)