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Trends Analysis
Outreach and Education
Internet Data Delivery
DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Mapping wetlands and watersheds is essential for the protection and maintenance of water quality and quantity, plant and wildlife habitat, open space aesthetics, and global carbon reserves. Tiner (2000) defines strategies for conservation and restoration of wetlands both from the government/regulatory perspective and from the individual/corporate perspective. Wetlands and watershed maps allow many of the strategies he cites to be met (Table 11).
Trends Analysis
Questions arising from the trends analyses on the combined wetlands dataset derived from the Oswegatchie-Black (Roy et al. 1996, 1997), Upper Hudson (Primack et al. 2000), and St. Regis River projects are important in the context of setting wetland and watershed protection guidelines on a Park-wide basis.
The APA is undertaking a strategic planning effort to develop policies that will guide it into the future. A staff team has been assembled to develop a plan to monitor trends in Park natural, cultural, and other resources of special significance and to identify potential partnerships for data gathering. Wetland and watershed maps completed for the Oswegatchie-Black (Roy et al. 1996, 1997), Upper Hudson (Primack et al. 2000), and St. Regis River projects are a key baseline data resource for this trends analysis plan. Each of these three major watersheds exhibits unique physical and biological characteristics. Discussed and analyzed together, these wetlands and sub-watershed data provide a large (2.5 million-acre, 1 million-ha) landscape perspective of hydrology and surface water accumulation. To ultimately provide a cohesive baseline dataset that can be used in Park-wide wetland trends monitoring, it will be necessary to compile data from these three major watersheds, and others completed in the future, and apply uniform analyses. Historic data from sources such as those discussed in the Literature Survey section of this report are key for developing the temporal component of a trends study. We recommend that upon completion of the St. Lawrence II mapping effort the following questions, and others, be posed and answered across all three major watersheds with results submitted to a peer reviewed journal:
•What are the dominant cover types in each of the watersheds? What are the non-dominant cover types?
•What are the patterns of wetland distribution (watershed/ landscape position) in the Park?
•What are the patterns of wetland loss, and is there a particular cover type that is being lost at a high rate? If so, what wetland functions are being lost with the loss of this wetland type?
| Table 11. Selected strategies for conservation and restoration of wetlands from Tiner (2000), and the ways in which wetlands and watershed maps can be used to meet these strategies. |
| Strategy | Use of wetlands and watershed maps |
| Develop comprehensive master plans for cities and towns that include wetland conservation as a major goal. | Maps will help municipalities focus their goals by defining the location, extent, and interactions of the wetland resource. |
| Consider techniques to improve local wetland protection such as partnering with municipal programs for water quality / stormwater management, green space, and recreation. | Use a GIS to determine the spatial relationships between wetlands, watersheds, and areas of high runoff (parking lots), areas of high development (density of real property centroids - see discussion in Primack et al. 2000), toxic sites, old mine sites, etc. |
| Accelerate wetland restoration on public lands with voluntary landowner support. | Providing map data to the public increases awareness of how resources on a property affect/are affected by the surroundings and may increase public involvement in the protection of those resources on private land. |
| Provide tax and other economic incentives to private landowners and industry to promote wetlands preservation and restoration. | Maps show areas of large wetland complexes and areas of unique habitat. These might be areas to target for conservation easements. |
| Increase public awareness of wetland values and the status of wetlands through various media. | The Internet offers an excellent avenue for public distribution of map data. |
| Strategy | Use of wetlands and watershed maps |
| Seek non-wetland sites for development projects and avoid or minimize wetland and buffer impacts during project construction. | Maps will help people to know where wetlands are before they start a project. Avoiding developing these areas will lessen wetlands violations. |
| Work with public agencies and others to restore previously degraded wetlands on your property. | Wetlands maps will act as a witness to the original wetland type found on the property and help to focus restoration goals. Watershed maps may help to define the factor(s) that led to wetland degradation for future avoidance. |
| Communicate the importance of wetland protection to family members, friends, neighbors, company executives, and policy-making government officials. | Adjoining properties may own parts of the same wetland. Neighbors could form a wetland protection organization, similar to a lake/shoreline association, with family members and the local government. |
In addition to creating partnerships with landowners, a major objective of the outreach effort of this project was to increase awareness about land management from the perspectives of the landscape, watershed, and region. For instance, one could ask the questions:
•How do the wetlands on the property interact to influence water quality of major water bodies on my property? (Landscape perspective)
•How might timber harvesting on my property affect downstream resources in the watershed? (Watershed perspective)
•What may be happening in other parts of the continent that may be affecting my property because of prevailing winds? (Regional perspective)
Watershed-wide and Park-wide maps were used to convey these ideas, however, one short-coming of this attempt to widen perspectives was that map interpretations focused mostly on logging use of the property while only touching upon the landowners' interests in recreation and wildlife habitat. Interpretations about trout habitat requirements, trail siting, or glacial influences on soils and watershed formation would likely have been of additional interest to the audience, and would have served as an exercise in looking at the landscape from different perspectives.
It was interesting to observe which layers were of perceived by landowners to be of greatest value. These included the shaded relief, sub-watersheds in proximity to the parcel, wetlands, slope, digital orthophotography, and nitrogen deposition maps. These were either the maps with the most detail, like the wetlands and orthophotography maps, or the maps that made them look at their property from a new perspective, like the sub-watershed and nitrogen deposition maps. Although the nitrogen deposition map cannot directly be used for forest management, it was of interest to the landowners because it brought a factor of forest health (potential acidifying/fertilizing effect of precipitation) to mind not usually considered. There was less interest in the soils map and its derivatives, soil erodibility and forest productivity, perhaps because the map came from low-resolution Park-wide data and looked coarse and pixilated.
Internet Data Delivery
Unlike traditional paper maps, the map server medium is dynamic allowing the user to define viewing extent, scale, thematic data layers, and do queries, logical searches, and buffers on the data. The APA will provide at least three different pre-defined map services to aid the user in focusing his/her data exploration: one for users with regulatory interests, one for research interests, and one for tourism. For example, the user with regulatory interests could view a map with buffered wetlands to help plan how far back a building should go from the edge of the wetland; the researcher could query the soils map to show calcareous soils where unusual plants might be found; and the tourist could view maps of state campgrounds that occur near large bodies of water. The possibilities for public use of Adirondack GIS data on the Internet are numerous.
Landowner outreach is an ongoing process that tools like a GIS and the Internet are helping to make easier and more up-to-date as the APA and partners create new data. Providing detailed spatial data, like the watershed and wetlands maps, for public exploration makes protection efforts easier as increased knowledge of the resource is gained. The relationship built from partnerships with other organizations and public outreach is essential to improved communication between the state agency and citizens and is invaluable for the long-term protection of Adirondack Park resources.
Continue to next section of St. Regis Report: Appendix1 - List of Quadrangles
The APA is actively developing a way to make Park-wide data available to all Park residents and visitors via the Internet. The Internet has become the first source many people turn to for information, therefore an on-line service where APA data can be shared with the public is a necessity. The results of the landowner meetings helped to define the organization of the on-line maps, especially their opinions about which maps were most useful and in what data layer combinations. The on-line map user will be able to further refine the maps based on his/her interests and plot them on a home printer.
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References Cited