DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATIVE REMOTE SENSING APPROACHES FOR UPDATING THE NATIONAL WETLANDS INVENTORY

The goal of this agreement is to leverage the expertise of ARS and the University of Maryland to develop and test new approaches to rapidly and cost effectively update the National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) geospatial dataset. The objective of these approaches will be to semi-automate the identification and removal/addition of areas of wetland loss and/or gain from the NWI dataset. The University of Maryland, with support from ARS, will be responsible for development of automated approaches to detect wetland gain/loss, and will work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to apply these approaches to develop updated NWI data.