Abstract
Wetland management needs include requirements for both overall wetland planning and management by local, state, regional and national agencies and internal management of large wetlands. Landsat digital data can potentially supply management information such as location, area, wetland type, seasonal extent of surface. Inundation changes in vegetative composition and thus wildlife habitat potential, impact of construction or water-level control and information for wetland evaluation. However, at present (1981), Landsat classification accuracies for wetland type or vegetation are often as low as 70 percent. These generally unsatisfactory results are due to Landsat resolution, spectral and spatial heterogeneity of wetlands and vegetative communities, spectral overlap with nonwetlands, and inherent problems of boundary pixels and pixel correlation. Better accuracies are needed for wetland management. Improvement might be obtained through prestratification of data, use of disparate data sets, more efficient use of temporal data, and development of classification categories Which can be duplicated from one date to the next.
Date of this Version
1981