Remote sensing of terrestrial and submerged aquatic vegetation at Fire Island National Seashore: Long-term resource management and monitoring

Wang, Y.; Traber, Michael

Fire Island National Seashore (FIIS) is located on Fire Island, a member of the Long Island barrier island system in the State of New York. As a barrier island, the vegetation communities and spatial patterns on Fire Island are highly dynamic, resulting from interactions with driving forces such as sand deposition, storm-driven over wash, salt spray, surface water, as well as human disturbances. Therefore, mapping the vegetation on FIIS is an important task for the Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network (NCBN) of the National Park Service (NPS) Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program. In 1994, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) began the Vegetation Mapping Program in cooperation with the NPS. A vegetation mapping project at FIIS was initiated in June of 1999 and completed by the contracted agencies in 2002 (Klopfer et al., 2002). That project followed the standards and general procedures of other NPS Vegetation Mapping Program projects, in which vegetation classification and mapping were accomplished via manual delineation using 1997 aerial photography. The classification used five broadly defined vegetation groups: salt marshes, dune grasslands, dune shrublands, interdunal swales, and forests/shrublands. These types were further classified into 27 different associations representative of a typical middle and upper Atlantic barrier island system. In all, a total of 39 classes of land cover were mapped on Fire Island and the park’s associated William Floyd Estate. (This data product will subsequently be referred to as the Phase I map.) The Phase I mapping project also identified several potential points for improvement. One of the suggestions was that since the barrier island is constantly changing, updates to the map product should be completed on a regular basis as to ensure changes are rapidly assessed. In addition, we noted that two further efforts were needed to enhance the results of the completed vegetation mapping project, or Phase I map, at the Fire Island National Seashore. First, there was a need to explore new data sources and approaches that could more efficiently update vegetation maps. The recent development of high-resolution satellite remote sensing data offers one possible solution. For example, QuickBird-2 satellite data possess 0.61-meter spatial resolution for the panchromatic band and 2.5-meter spatial resolution for the multispectral bands ranging from the visible to the near infrared spectrum. These high spatial resolution satellite data can meet the requirements of NPS vegetation mapping efforts and facilitate long-term monitoring. Second, a missing component from the Phase I map of FIIS was information about submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV). Seagrass communities are among the richest and most productive coastal systems. SAV habitats protect and improve water quality, provide shoreline stabilization, and are important for an array of fish, birds, and other wildlife. Natural and human impacts on these vital resources from population growth, pollution, physical damage, and other activities can disrupt the growth of seagrass communities and have devastating effects on their health and vitality. Inventory and monitoring efforts are required to determine the dynamics of seagrass ecosystems and devise better management and restoration for these rich resources. Therefore, an effort to extract information about SAV along FIIS became necessary. The primary goal of this project was to explore efficient uses of remote sensing data sources and technical approaches to map both terrestrial and submerged aquatic vegetation at FIIS.

Remote sensing of terrestrial and submerged aquatic vegetation at Fire Island National Seashore: Long-term resource management and monitoring

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