MODELING RIPARIAN ZONES UTILIZING DEMS, FLOOD HEIGHT DATA, DIGITAL SOIL DATA AND NATIONAL WETLAND INVENTORY VIA GIS

摘要

Riparian zones are dynamic, transitional ecosystems between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems with well defined vegetation and soil characteristics. Development of an all-encompassing definition for riparian ecotones, because of their high variability, is challenging. However, there are two primary factors that all riparian ecotones are dependent on: the watercourse and its associated floodplain. Previous approaches to riparian boundary delineation have utilized fixed width buffers, but this methodology has proven to be inadequate as it only takes the watercourse into consideration and ignores the critical surrounding geomorphology, associated vegetation and soil characteristics. This approach offers advantages over other previously used methods by utilizing a better sampling technique along the water course that can distinguish the 50-year flood edge associated with the floodplain and by utilizing the Digital Soil Data (DSD) and National Wetland Inventory (NWI) databases to distinguish riparian soils and vegetation characteristics associated and adjacent with riparian zones of the same floodplain. The result of this study is a GIS based model in a form of an ArcGIS tool box attached to ESRI ArcMap software to delineate a variable-width riparian boundary.