A Decision‐Support System for Prioritizing Restoration Sites on the Mississippi River Alluvial Plain

Abstract

Conversion of forested wetlands to agricultural use and the resulting fragmentation of the landscape has led to concerns for the functional integrity of the Mississippi River Alluvial Plain ecosystem. We describe an effort spearheaded by The Nature Conservancy to initiate a multi‐decade partnership dedicated to creating and implementing a viable, cooperative, landscape‐level restoration project in the Mississippi River Alluvial Plain. Important phases of the process during the first 5 years were (1) initiation of the development of an extensive network of partners, including state and federal agencies, private land owners, conservation groups, academicians, and other interested citizens; (2) development of a geographic information system (GIS) for the entire extent of the ecosystem; and (3) for one watershed, the Tensas basin in northeastern Louisiana, refinement of a high resolution GIS to generate more detailed land‐use conversion statistics to demonstrate the feasibility of a semi‐objective, landscape‐scale restoration planning procedure, including methodology for prioritization of existing wetland forest patches and areas most suitable for reforestation and connection via corridors.

Past, current and future drivers for the development of decision support systems in forest management

“…Some of the papers which were published before 1998 later on occurred persistently as important references for later studies in forest-related journals. For instance, the contributions by Davis and Martell (1993), Llewellyn et al (1996), Naesset (1997) or Tecle et al (1998) were cited at least 25 times each. The 223 selected documents are cited 1889 times by 1585 documents in Scopus.…”

Model for Prioritizing Best Management Practice Implementation: Sediment Load Reduction

“…Hruby and others (1995) describe the indicator value assessment, a rapid assessment procedure that considers wetland values on a regional scale. Llewellyn and others (1996) studied a restoration planning procedure for prioritizing existing wetland forest patches, and Walter and others (2000) suggested the term of HSA (hydrological sensitive area) for identifying water quality risk reduction targets. Machado and others (2006) presented a framework to prioritize conservation investments by considering social benefits, with the objective of supporting farmland preservation programs.…”

A logit model for predicting wetland location using ASTER and GIS

“…According to the state summary from the National Water Summary on Wetland Resources, Virginia has about 1 million acres (about 405 000 hectares) of wetlands, and about threequarters are non-tidal wetlands (Dahl and Allord 1997). Several studies highlight the importance of wetlands regarding water quality and water holding capacity (Bruland and Richardson 2004), as well as sediment retention (Lewellyn et al 1995). In addition, wetlands are important feeding, breeding, and drinking areas for wildlife, and provide a stopping place refuge for waterfowl (Burdick et al 1989, In 1977, the US Clean Water Act (CWA) established that no discharge of dredged or fill material into waters of the United States can be permitted if a practical alternative exists that is less damaging to the aquatic environment or if the Nation's waters would be significantly degraded (United States Army Corps of Engineers 1995).…”

“…Although the spatial resolution of the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) is 30 m, some scientists believe that as many as 25 pixels are needed to be confident of classification units (Federal Geographic Data Committee 1992, Ozesmi andBauer 2002). Coarser resolution satellite imagery provides more generalized results, and small patches can be omitted or misclassified (Llewellyn et al 1996). Wright and Gallant (2007) demonstrated the value of using classification trees to combine Landsat TM imagery with image texture and ancillary environmental data to model probabilities of palustrine wetlands.…”