National Wetlands Research Center

Selected Fiscal Year 2009 Accomplishments
of the USGS National Wetlands Research Center

Creation of the Delta Research and Global Observation Network (DRAGON): an International Partnership

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, proposals to re-engineer the Mississippi River and Delta emerged.  Realizing that deltas throughout the world are similarly threatened and that the International Panel on Climate Change had reported that 300 million people living in deltas are in danger because of rising sea level, the USGS convened an international conference of 150 scientists from 10 nations in 2007.  They developed the Delta Research and Global Observation Network (DRAGON) partnership to establish a community of practice that could share data and produce visualization tools to integrate ecological and societal data to forecast the future of these deltas for decision makers, managers, and the public (deltas.usgs.gov).  In June 2008 the U.S. President and Vietnamese Prime Minister agreed to cooperate on climate change and welcomed the establishment of the DRAGON partnership in Vietnam to promote healthy ecosystems and sustainable deltas.  In 2008 several international DRAGON workshops were held, and the DRAGON Institute-Can Tho opened in November. In June 2009, several international meetings were held in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia to establish a DRAGON Advisory Council and set up a Working Group on Deltas. In June 2009, the Dragon Asia Summit convened in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and was attended by about 130 scientists from 11 nations, two U.S. ambassadors, and three ministers of Cambodia. The USGS is entering into a partnership with the U.S. State Department to produce "Forecast Mekong," an interactive data integration, modeling, and visualization system for the Mekong River Basin. In July, the USGS Central Regional Director and the NWRC Director met in Thailand with Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton and foreign ministers of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam to give an overview of how the system will work.

Title: Lower Mississippi Valley Integrated Landscape Model

The Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) is the largest floodplain in the United States, extending from southern Missouri and Illinois to the northern Gulf of Mexico and encompassing many conservation issues, from climate change to restoring ecosystem services like migratory bird habitat and carbon sequestration.  To address these issues, the USGS has developed an integrated landscape model to provide scientific information to inform management decisions. The LMV partnership consists of many Federal, State, university, and non-governmental partnerships (http://www.lmvsci.gov/index.aspx), but the primary users of the model are the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which use it to evaluate the effectiveness of conservation practices, ecosystem restoration, water management, and species protection and recovery. Currently the model quantifies bird species richness, duck energy days, amphibian occupancy rates, climate regulation (carbon sequestration), and water quality.

Louisiana Land Loss from Hurricanes

In 2009, the USGS National Wetlands Research Center published Scientific Investigations Map 3080, “Land area change in coastal Louisiana 2004 to 2008:  an overview of major hurricane impacts after 2004.”  This report continues the important analysis of wetland loss that NWRC has done for more than 30 years by using geographic information systems, satellite imagery, and aerial photography.  This map is a follow-up to last year’s Scientific Investigations Map 3019 and pamphlet, “Land area change in coastal Louisiana—a multidecadal perspective (from 1956 to 2006),” a collaborative work between biology and geology.  Federal and State agencies depend on these analyses, which are presented at not only scientific meetings but also at a myriad of government task forces involved in coastal recovery.  Information on the location, extent, and kind of wetland loss factors into decisions on where coastal recovery should take place.  The public and media also have great interest in these products to better understand what parts of the coast are most vulnerable to future hurricanes.

Research Reveals Coastal Marshes May Be Able To Keep Pace with Sea-level Rise

Recently completed USGS research on climate change reported that elevated carbon dioxide might influence the capacity of coastal ecosystems to keep pace with sea-level rise. This finding is important as it may constitute a missing part of climate change models that forecast the effects of sea-level rise.  The research, reported in major scientific publications (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America and the Journal of Ecology), has attracted wide media attention and is of interest to scientists who model climate change.  The work was conducted at the National Wetlands Research Center’s Wetland Elevated Carbon Dioxide Experimental Facility, the only one of its kind in the USGS.

Hurricane Emergency Response

Before Hurricane Ike made landfall last hurricane season, the State of Texas enacted the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters, which provides a unified system for acquiring space data to those affected by natural or human-created disasters.  Thirty-three hours after Hurricane Ike made landfall, a USGS remote-sensing researcher at the USGS National Wetlands Research Center used these data to provide advanced aperture radar (ASAR) imagery to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  The cloud-penetrating ASAR images (in contrast to Landsat TM imagery) were among the first satellite images showing the storm surge flooding extent.  They provided an unobstructed view of the impacted area, from Galveston, Texas, to southwest Louisiana, thus greatly improving search and rescue efforts. It was used during the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike. An article, “A case of timely satellite image acquisition in support of coastal emergency environmental response management,” will document this work and will be the cover story this fall in the Journal of Coastal Research. In addition to the ASAR imagery for rescue operations, the National Wetlands Research Center deployed its Science Research Vehicle to Houston and Lake Charles in support of FEMA. The vehicle is equipped with computers, software, and plotters to provide spatial analyses during and after natural disasters.

Wetlands Special Feature: Hurricanes and the Coast of the Gulf of Mexico

Wetlands, Journal of the Society of Wetland Scientists, published a 408-page “Special Features: Hurricanes and the Coast of the Gulf of Mexico” (Volume 29, Number 1, March 2009), inspired by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. Edited by two scientists from the USGS National Wetlands Research Center, the volume featured the work of numerous USGS and other authors and is intended to serve as a useful baseline for future hurricane research. Scientists and land managers are using the materials to examine hurricane impacts on coastal landforms and the consequent vegetation changes in coastal marshes as well as a hurricane’s influence on coastal forests, including animal habitats.  The work will aid ecologists in understanding the cumulative and long-term impacts of storms in order to prepare for what may be increasingly storm-ravaged coasts throughout the world.

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