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Mapping changes in tidal wetland vegetation composition and pattern across a salinity gradient using high spatial resolution imagery

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Abstract

Detailed vegetation mapping of wetlands, both natural and restored, can offer valuable information about vegetation diversity and community structure and provides the means for examining vegetation change over time. We mapped vegetation at six tidal marshes (two natural, four restored) in the San Francisco Estuary, CA, USA, between 2003 and 2004 using detailed vegetation field surveys and high spatial-resolution color-infrared aerial photography. Vegetation classes were determined by performing hierarchical agglomerative clustering on the field data collected from each tidal marsh. Supervised classification of the CIR photography resulted in vegetation class mapping accuracies ranging from 70 to 92%; 10 out of 12 classification accuracies were above 80%, demonstrating the potential to map emergent wetland vegetation. The number of vegetation classes decreased with salinity, and increased with size and age. In general, landscape diversity, as measured by the Shannon’s diversity index, also decreased with salinity, with an exception for the most saline site, a newly restored marsh. Vegetation change between years is evident, but the differences across sites in composition and pattern were larger than change within sites over two growing seasons.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the CALFED California Bay-Delta Program. The CALFED Science Program supported most of this work under Grant Number 4600002970. The CALFED Ecosystem Restoration Program supported manuscript preparation under Grant Number P0685516. Jake Schweitzer was instrumental in processing and georectifying aerial imagery from HJW GeoSpatial, Inc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, 130 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA, 94720-3114, USA

    Karin Tuxen, Lisa Schile & Maggi Kelly

  2. Google Inc, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, 94043, USA

    Karin Tuxen

  3. PRBO Conservation Science, 3820 Cypress Dr. #11, Petaluma, CA, 94954, USA

    Diana Stralberg

  4. Wetlands and Water Resources, Inc, 818 Fifth Ave, Suite 208, San Rafael, CA, 94901, USA

    Stuart Siegel

  5. Department of Biology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Lisa Schile, Tom Parker & Michael Vasey

  6. Department of Environmental Sciences, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    John Callaway

  7. Geospatial Innovation Facility, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Maggi Kelly

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  1. Karin Tuxen
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  2. Lisa Schile
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  8. Maggi Kelly
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Correspondence to Maggi Kelly.

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Tuxen, K., Schile, L., Stralberg, D. et al. Mapping changes in tidal wetland vegetation composition and pattern across a salinity gradient using high spatial resolution imagery. Wetlands Ecol Manage 19, 141–157 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-010-9207-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-010-9207-x

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