Use of remote sensing to track changes to fish habitat in a modified wetland / by James V. Marcaccio, Jesse Gardner Costa, and Jonathan D. Midwood.: Fs97-6/3501E-PDF

"Development and restoration works modify aquatic habitat and often require monitoring by proponents to ensure projects do not cause undue harm to fishes and their habitat. With traditional field surveys, areal cover of habitat can be difficult to ascertain and cannot be sampled retroactively. With remote sensing, analysts can easily identify changes in fish habitat using historic habitat imagery before projects are undertaken to assess pre-intervention conditions. In this document we show how remote sensing can be used to delineate changes to fish habitat following modification of a wetland in Lake Ontario. Even though our work started a decade after modification, we estimated both pre- and post-construction habitat area using historic, high resolution (<5m pixel) image archives. Created ponds see significantly more aquatic habitat after construction and no significant changes thereafter, though the composition of wetland species in these ponds is different than similar undisturbed ponds. Summer imagery requires a more complex workflow but can describe species within habitat types, while spring/fall workflows are rapid but can only identify broad land cover categories. Results between the two methods are difficult to compare so one method/seasonality should be maintained for consistent monitoring. These workflows can allow for rapid discrimination of aquatic habitat without requiring direct field observations and can be applied for historical and future monitoring"--Abstract, page vii.

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