Evaluating the sensitivity of wetlands to climate change with remote sensing techniques

Ouyang, Zutao; Becker, R. H.; Shaver, Wade; Chen, Jiquan

doi:10.1002/hyp.9685

Cited by 15 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…, Ouyang et al. ). Our work integrates the most recent climate and hydrological models to corroborate the negative projected effects on wetland densities and highlights the strong and interactive effects of climate and land use and land cover.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Projected wetland densities under climate change: habitat loss but little geographic shift in conservation strategy

Sofaer

Skagen

Barsugli

et al. 2016

Ecological Applications

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Climate change poses major challenges for conservation and management because it alters the area, quality, and spatial distribution of habitat for natural populations. To assess species' vulnerability to climate change and target ongoing conservation investments, researchers and managers often consider the effects of projected changes in climate and land use on future habitat availability and quality and the uncertainty associated with these projections. Here, we draw on tools from hydrology and climate science to project the impact of climate change on the density of wetlands in the Prairie Pothole Region of the USA, a critical area for breeding waterfowl and other wetland-dependent species. We evaluate the potential for a trade-off in the value of conservation investments under current and future climatic conditions and consider the joint effects of climate and land use. We use an integrated set of hydrological and climatological projections that provide physically based measures of water balance under historical and projected future climatic conditions. In addition, we use historical projections derived from ten general circulation models (GCMs) as a baseline from which to assess climate change impacts, rather than historical climate data. This method isolates the impact of greenhouse gas emissions and ensures that modeling errors are incorporated into the baseline rather than attributed to climate change. Our work shows that, on average, densities of wetlands (here defined as wetland basins holding water) are projected to decline across the U.S. Prairie Pothole Region, but that GCMs differ in both the magnitude and the direction of projected impacts. However, we found little evidence for a shift in the locations expected to provide the highest wetland densities under current vs. projected climatic conditions. This result was robust to the inclusion of projected changes in land use under climate change. We suggest that targeting conservation towards wetland complexes containing both small and relatively large wetland basins, which is an ongoing conservation strategy, may also act to hedge against uncertainty in the effects of climate change.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…, Liu and Schwartz , , Ouyang et al. ). However, there is a need to evaluate the variability among climate projections and their implications for projected wetland densities in the PPR, as well as to understand the potential interactions between climate and land‐use change.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Projected wetland densities under climate change: habitat loss but little geographic shift in conservation strategy

Sofaer

Skagen

Barsugli

et al. 2016

Ecological Applications

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“…Other approaches are to use remote sensing techniques to measure and project the response of wetland numbers and area across the PPR to current and future climates [85,86] and to determine how connections among wetlands may be altered by climate change [87]. Overall, modeling efforts agree that a warmer climate without increased precipitation would have a negative impact on the sustainability of prairie-pothole wetlands [36,88]. A more widely distributed application of our approach will help further the understanding of how synergistic effects of both climate and land-use change propagate on a landscape scale.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synergistic Interaction of Climate and Land-Use Drivers Alter the Function of North American, Prairie-Pothole Wetlands

et al. 2019

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Prairie-pothole wetlands provide the critical habitat necessary for supporting North American migratory waterfowl populations. However, climate and land-use change threaten the sustainability of these wetland ecosystems. Very few experiments and analyses have been designed to investigate the relative impacts of climate and land-use change drivers, as well as the antagonistic or synergistic interactions among these drivers on ecosystem processes. Prairie-pothole wetland water budgets are highly dependent on atmospheric inputs and especially surface runoff, which makes them especially susceptible to changes in climate and land use. Here, we present the history of prairie-pothole climate and land-use change research and address the following research questions: 1) What are the relative effects of climate and land-use change on the sustainability of prairie-pothole wetlands? and 2) Do the effects of climate and land-use change interact differently under different climatic conditions? To address these research questions, we modeled 25 wetland basins and measured the response of the lowest wetland in the watershed to wetland drainage and climate variability. We found that during an extremely wet period (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000) wetland drainage decreased the time at which the lowest wetland reached its spill point by four years, resulting in 10 times the amount of water spilling out of the watershed towards local stream networks. By quantifying the relative effects of both climate and land-use drivers on wetland ecosystems our findings can help managers cope with uncertainties about flooding risks and provide insight into how to manage wetlands to restore functionality.Sustainability 2019, 11, 6581 2 of 20 and biological (e.g., vegetation and aquatic macroinvertebrate communities) variables of interest in areas where vulnerable wetlands that have been well documented as a "disappearing ecosystem" [4].The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) covers approximately 777,000 km 2 of the North American midcontinent (Figure 1). Over half of the historical wetlands in the PPR have been drained, and conversion of upland areas to crops has altered wetland functioning and the ecosystem services provided by wetlands [5]. Millions of small, glacially derived wetlands that provide critical habitat for migratory waterfowl [5] and other wetland-dependent species [6,7] occur in the PPR, making it a continentally significant region for biodiversity [8]. The wetlands of the PPR also provide additional ecosystem services such as floodwater storage, sediment reduction, water-quality improvement [9], and carbon sequestration [10]. The need to tease apart the complexity caused by interactions between climate and land-use change drivers and how they affect biodiversity, in general, has been recently established as a pressing research priority for ecosystem scientists and land managers [2]. Understanding the relative impacts of climate and land-use change on wetland hydrology is critical for developing land-management strategies...

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“…The Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI) is an index used to determine extent of open water and has been used to determine open water extent of wetlands successfully [27,28]. By using what Xu [27] calls the MIR band (such as Landsat Band 5, covering 1.55-1.75 microns FWHM), in place of the IR band used in the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) (Landsat Band 4, covering 0.76-0.90 microns), it is possible to achieve reliable quick discrimination of open water features [27].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This method works well due to the extremely high absorption of water throughout the infrared region, particularly relative to the visible region (represented by the green band). When tested against visual inspection of aerial photos in wetlands environments in the US Prairie Pothole region, this was found to provide an estimate of open water extent accurate to between 0.5% and 1.5% of the open water area derived from aerial photos [28]. MNDWI is defined as:…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Stalled Recovery of the Iraqi Marshes

Becker

2014

Remote Sensing

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Abstract:The Iraqi (Mesopotamian) Marshes, an extensive wetlands system in Iraq, has been heavily impacted by both human and climate forces over the past decades. In the period leading up to the Second Gulf War in 2002, the marshlands were shrinking due to both a policy of draining and water diversion in Iraq and construction of dams upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Following the war through 2006, this trend was reversed as the diversions were removed and active draining stopped. A combination of MODIS and GRACE datasets were used to determine the change in surface water area (SWA) in the marshes, marshland extent and change in mass both upriver in the Tigris and Euphrates watersheds and in the marshlands.

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Evaluating the sensitivity of wetlands to climate change with remote sensing techniques

Cited by 15 publications

References 32 publications

Projected wetland densities under climate change: habitat loss but little geographic shift in conservation strategy

Projected wetland densities under climate change: habitat loss but little geographic shift in conservation strategy

Synergistic Interaction of Climate and Land-Use Drivers Alter the Function of North American, Prairie-Pothole Wetlands

The Stalled Recovery of the Iraqi Marshes

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