Remote Sensing to Characterize River Floodplain Aquatic and Riparian Habitats

Satellite (Quickbird II) and airborne (LIDAR, hyperspectral and ultra-high (<10cm) resolution multispectral, and thermal IR) imagery are used to characterize riparian and aquatic habitats of alluvial, gravel-bed river floodplains.  Aquatic environments are classified into discrete habitats (e.g., springs, riffles, backwater pools, turbulent runs, eddy pools, etc) by their unique hydraulic character (depth, Froude), channel position, and connectivity composition across the riverscape.  Thermal IR provides data of thermal variation and serves as indicators of groundwater-surface water interaction. Riparian forest vegetation is classified by species through supervised classification of pixel-specific reflectance signatures. Vegetation is further separated into age classes for dominant gallery forest species by coupling LIDAR bare-earth DEM and LIDAR first-return metrics to determine canopy height across the vegetation classification.  The integration of these various sources of remote sensing data allows us to characterize the floodplain riparian and aquatic habitats and model their change through space and time at ultra-high resolution.