PARENT SESSION
Poster Session 13: Landscape Ecology / Geomorphology
Tuesday, August 9, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM, Exhibit Hall 220 A-E, Level 2, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Characterizing Florida Everglades vegetation pattern and import scale lengths for hydrologic modeling and restoration monitoring.

Jones, John^*,1, ¹ U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA

ABSTRACT- The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan includes various management and monitoring activities aimed at improving the condition of Florida Everglades and Florida Bay habitats while providing for multiple uses of limited water resources. For these purposes, surface water stage and flow will be manipulated throughout the Okeechobee-Everglades watershed. Models that simulate and forecast surface flow are proving valuable in planning, enacting, adapting, and monitoring Everglades restoration actions. These models require information on vegetation because South Florida topographic gradients are so small that vegetation plays an important role in the distribution and flow of Everglades surface water. The sizes of spatial resolution elements in current and developing regional hydrologic models were determined largely by operational constraints, not any analyses of the scale-lengths over which important processes may operate. USGS vegetation mapping efforts have focused on the combination of in situ, airborne, and satellite-based technologies to produce digital databases of vegetation biomass and leaf area index for use in use in hydrologic modeling and ecosystem monitoring. In turn, spatial analyses of the generated vegetation fields have increased our understanding of resolution requirements for these modeling and monitoring activities. Landscape metrics applied to multi-resolution datasets of Everglades vegetation density characteristics quantify the sizes, shapes, and directions of vegetation patches. These metrics show that important spatial variations in vegetation type and density occur at scale-lengths well below the 500m cell size currently used in relatively fine resolution hydrodynamic models of the Everglades region. The challenge then, is to find ways of adapting model parameters to account for measured sub-grid heterogeneity and the spatial arrangement of pertinent vegetation characteristics.

Key words: scale, pattern, vegetation, hydrology