Plant Community Monitoring in the Upper St. Johns River Basin. Technical Publication SJ2004-6

摘要

The purpose of this document is to outline a long-term plan for monitoring plant communities in the Upper St. Johns River Basin using remote sensing. Information collected from plant community monitoring will be useful for a number of purposes ranging from evaluating the quality of fish and wildlife habitat to documenting the success or failure of various restoration and management activities. To provide a long-term record of conditions within the basin, infrared aerial photographs at a scale of 1:24,000 were taken in 1995 and 1997 and will be taken of the entire basin every 2 years in the spring, beginning in spring 2001. These and future photographs will be examined systematically after they are received and compared to previous aerial photographs, in order to identify any widespread changes in vegetation patterns that may have occurred. These photographs will be useful for locating problem areas that may require immediate management attention. A detailed vegetation map of the entire basin will be created using the photographs taken in spring 2001. We plan to recreate this vegetation map every 6 years. In this plan, we provide a standard vegetation classification scheme using 32 defined categories and a standard technique for ground-truthing. Accuracy assessments will be reported on each map created. Plant species lists as well as a description of the dominant species present will be generated during the ground-truthing effort. Methods for assessing plant community change are also discussed.