Why We Need to Protect Wetlands

One thing I learned working with one my long-time clients, the Society of Wetland Scientists (SWS), is the important role wetlands can play in mitigating climate change through carbon sequestration. Did you know that wetlands store twice as much carbon as the world’s forests?

Wetlands also:

• Protect shorelines from erosion, for example during storms
• Act as a sponge to alleviate flooding
• Improve water quality, removing pollutants through physical, chemical and biological processes
• Serve as reservoirs to replenish water supplies
• Provide habitat for both land and aquatic species, including one third of all threatened and endangered species

Well, you get the point – They are a pretty big deal.

Monitoring for Management

Wetlands are traditionally difficult to monitor due to the dynamic nature of wetland conditions, including periodic flooding. However, without accurate maps and ongoing monitoring, how can wetlands be effectively managed? In the interest of both enhancing understanding of wetland ecosystems and building effective conservation strategies, new technologies are being used to accurately map these areas more quickly.

New Technology Facilitates Scalable Wetland Monitoring

The Journal of Remote Sensing discusses research by a team of researchers from Mississippi State University and the University of North Carolina Wilmington using unmanned aerial systems (UASs) equipped with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and multispectral sensors. High resolution elevation data and detailed vegetation imagery were collected and then accurately classified by wetland type by machine learning algorithms.

New technology, such as LiDAR, is providing increased mapping accuracy in an efficient and cost-effective manner, making way for more effective wetland management and better-informed policy-making.

Source:

Precision Mapping of Coastal Wetlands: An Integrated Remote Sensing Approach Using Unoccupied Aerial Systems Light Detection and Ranging and Multispectral Data | Journal of Remote Sensing (https://spj.science.org/doi/10.34133/remotesensing.0169)