Modeling Inundation to Identify Amphibian Habitats in a Restored Wetland

Wetlands provide habitat for multiple wildlife species as well as provide numerous ecosystem services such as flooding control along with nutrient and sediment sequestration. Wetlands have also suffered significant losses, over 80% in Kentucky since colonial settlement. Much of the historic tracts of bottomland hardwood forests found in western Kentucky have been lost, being converted to cropland. Restoration of degraded wetlands through programs such as the Wetlands Restoration Program (WRP) aim to restore the valuable habitat as well as ecosystem services these systems provide the greater area they reside. Whether restoration successfully restores the necessary habitat for species has been a question that remains largely dependent on the taxa of interest. Developing means of passively sampling wetlands through GIS and remote sensing could allow for greater insight into a wetlands value. One method of interest involves modeling the inundation of the easement, allowing one to visualize the distribution of individual pools within the larger wetland easement. For this project I am using 5ft digital elevation models (DEMs) to model various inundation levels for one of my study wetlands involved in my masters research. These models would allow for identification of ideal amphibian habitats, which often are not the deeper main pools, rather the side pools which are often missed in sampling efforts. These models may also help managers when developing restoration plans in order to maximize the diversity of habitat and pool size, increasing overall amphibian as well as biotic diversity gained from the restoration project