Potential Wetland Areas Across the Conterminous United States
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Wetlands provide habitat for thousands of species and a myriad of services for humans including flood protection, water quality improvement, and recreational activities. Researchers estimate that up to 53% of wetlands in the conterminous United States (CONUS) have been lost since the 1600s. Recognition of the importance of wetlands, regulatory policies, and voluntary USDA conservation programs, have resulted in the creation or restoration of wetlands. With sufficient information, landowners and decision makers can identify areas where wetland restoration would be likely to succeed helping them strategically target areas for the biggest impact.
This project builds on methodologies presented in Horvath, et al. (2017) which utilized the Compound Topographic Index (CTI) and soil drainage characteristics to identify Potential Wetland Areas (PWA) for CONUS at 30-m. For this effort, the spatial resolution was increased from 30-m to 10-m, and an additional 15 input variables derived from soils, satellite radar imagery, and elevation were used to predict PWA using a random forest machine learning algorithm.
Random forest models were trained on existing wetlands and applied at the level-2 hydrologic unit code (HUC-2) scale which divides CONUS into 18 regions.