U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

icon-dot-gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

icon-https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Mapping irregularly flooded wetlands, high marsh, and salt pannes/flats along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast (ver. 2.0, June 2023)

This data release includes geospatial data for irregularly flooded wetlands and high marsh and salt pannes/flats along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast from Texas to Florida. Specifically, this release includes seven products: (1) a map highlighting the continuous probability that an area is an irregularly flooded wetland; (2) a map of irregularly flooded wetland probability reclassified into four bins; (3) a map delineating high marsh and salt pannes/flats; (4) a map from Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana to the Florida Big Bend delineating the coverage of irregularly flooded wetlands that have Juncus roemerianus (Black needlerush) as the dominant vegetation species; (5) a spatial metadata file showing what elevation data were used for specific locations; (6) a supplemental version of the high marsh and salt pannes/flats map that has a second class for high marsh for parts of Texas where succulents and Distichlis spicata were dominant species; and (7) a dataset of supplemental project-specific field reference data collected throughout the northern Gulf of Mexico coast. Collectively, the products in this data release were developed using a two-step approach that utilized the best-available elevation data and satellite data from 2018 to 2020. The first step in the process was to create a probabilistic map of irregularly flooded wetlands using light detection and ranging (lidar)-derived digital elevation models (DEMs), tidal datums, and nuisance flooding levels. Monte Carlo simulations were used to propagate uncertainty in elevation-based data, and existing land cover data were used to restrict the output to coastal wetland areas. Due to the focus of this study on high marsh, these coastal wetland areas did not include tidal forested fresh wetlands. The second step was to delineate high marsh and salt pannes/flats using reference data which included project-specific data collection in collaboration with land managers and other ancillary datasets across the northern Gulf of Mexico coast. These data were combined with Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar imagery, multispectral optical satellite imagery from Sentinel-2, DEMs, and the irregularly flooded wetland probability layer to generate a contemporary map of high marsh and salt pannes/flats along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast. This product is the first regional map of these wetland systems across the northern Gulf of Mexico coast.

Get Data and Metadata
Author(s) Nicholas M Enwright orcid, Wyatt C. Cheney orcid, Kristine O Evans, Hana R Thurman orcid, Mark S. Woodrey, Auriel M Fournier, Anne Bauer, Jim Cox, Stephanie Goehring, Heather Hill, Karen Hondrick, Peter Kappes, Heather Levy, Jena Moon, J Andy Nyman, Jonathan L. Pitchford, Destinee Storey, Matt Sukiennik, Jennifer Wilson
Publication Date 2022-07-18
Beginning Date of Data 1999-01-01
Ending Date of Data 2022-03-02
Data Contact
DOI https://doi.org/10.5066/P9MLO26U
Citation Enwright, N.M., Cheney, W.C., Evans, K.O., Thurman, H.R., Woodrey, M.S., Fournier, A.M., Bauer, A., Cox, J., Goehring, S., Hill, H., Hondrick, K., Kappes, P., Levy, H., Moon, J., Nyman, J.A., Pitchford, J.L., Storey, D., Sukiennik, M., and Wilson, J., 2022, Mapping irregularly flooded wetlands, high marsh, and salt pannes/flats along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast (ver. 2.0, June 2023): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9MLO26U.
Metadata Contact
Metadata Date 2023-06-27
Related Publication
Citations of these data

Loading https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2023.113451


Loading https://doi.org/10.1016/J.RSE.2023.113451

Access public
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Loading...
Harvest Source: ScienceBase
Harvest Date: 2024-02-24T09:44:24.901Z