Hydrological Alteration

USGS researchers will quantify wetland change and wetland vegetation community type change through the analyses of aerial vegetation survey data and investigate potential relationships between Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and marsh elevation change.

The Biscayne Bay and Southeastern Everglades Ecosystem Restoration (BBSEER) project will use Bayesian networks developed within the Everglades Vulnerability Analysis framework but with an expanded set of predicted vegetation types to build a spatially explicit model predicting annual probability of vegetation types in response to hydrologic and other landscape factors.

USGS researchers will utilize long-term soil elevation change data to help advance understanding of soil elevation dynamics and ecological transformations due to climate change within coastal wetlands of the Greater Everglades.

USGS scientists are working with partners at the Puget Sound Partnership and the State of Washington’s Department of Ecology to develop two new tools to help us understand how human disturbance affects life at the top of Puget Sound: a Marine Benthic Index and a graphical causal model.

The Joint Ecosystem Modeling team will be running a suite of ecological models to evaluate scenarios and provide insight into how alternative restorations plans compare, indicate whether alternatives could lead to unintended consequences, and determine effects of alternatives that could conflict with other goals.

In the summer of 2021, instrumented platforms were deployed at Seven Mile Island Living Laboratory, New Jersey to conduct time series measurements of tidal velocity, turbidity, surface elevation, sediment concentration, and suspended sediment characteristics. The collected data will be used to provide decision support to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as they plan dredging activities in the Gulf...

Goals of the ATLSS Program are to help achieve a better understanding of components of the Everglades ecosystem, to provide an integrative tool for empirical studies, and to apply these tools to an adaptive management framework.

Estuaries and their surrounding wetlands are coastal transition zones where freshwater rivers meet tidal seawater. As sea levels rise, tidal forces move saltier water farther upstream, extending into freshwater wetland areas. Human changes to the surrounding landscape may amplify the effects of this tidal extension, impacting the resiliency and function of the upper estuarine wetlands. One visible...

A USGS forecasting tool helps Everglades natural resource managers identify management actions that can benefit one or more species while quantifying the potential costs to others.

The Joint Ecosystem Modeling (JEM) team will develop species distribution models that incorporate hydrologic and habitat variables known to influence Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow occurrence.

USGS scientists develop decision support tools to help inform management and restoration of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem.

Mottled ducks rely on the coastal marshes of the Texas Chenier Plain, which are considered among the most critically endangered habitats in the United States. USGS scientists are evaluating what might be contributing to the degradation of high-quality mottled duck habitat to better understand the causes of habitat loss and subsequently mitigate those losses.