Potential Wetland Areas and ACPF: Intersections and Ideas
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Considering wetland restoration at the regional, state, or watershed scale can provide targeted ecosystem services. Highly connected systems, particularly where hydrologic characteristics are foundational to the ecosystem, are more effective at providing ecosystem services compared to smaller, disjointed systems. There are currently limited resources to support landscape-level wetland planning that use consistent methods and data inputs across the conterminous United States. This study develops a map of potential wetland area, which may support restored or built wetlands to support better placement and planning in wetland restoration. The Random Forest algorithm is used to model potential wetland area in each of 18 two-digit hydrologic units that encompass the conterminous United States. Select subsystems from the National Wetland Inventory are used as training data for the algorithm to target inland shallow and estuarine subsystems. The resulting maps demonstrate the application of big data and machine learning to identify locations across a diverse landscape likely to support a specific ecosystem type. This product can be used to better place restoration projects to serve ecosystem- and community-wide health where placement of sites is critical to efficacy, including nutrient uptake and flood attenuation. The Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF) is a tool used by practitioner to place conservation practices to support environmental health alongside productive agricultural fields. To exemplify a use of the modeled potential wetland area product, we intersected the spatial results from ACPF and the potential wetland area. These intersections further confirm and highlight the best placement for wetlands as a conservation practice within agricultural landscapes.