The Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve vegetation mapping project: Interim Report-Eastern Big Cypress (Regions 5 & 6), Big Cypress National Preserve (Geospatial Product & Final Report)

The Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve vegetation mapping project is part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). It is a cooperative effort between the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and the National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Mapping Inventory Program (VMI). The goal of this project is to produce a spatially and thematically accurate vegetation map of Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve prior to the completion of restoration efforts. The vegetation map will serve as a record of baseline conditions to: (1) document changes to the spatial extent, pattern, and proportion of plant communities within these two federally-managed units as they respond to hydrologic modifications resulting from the implementation of the CERP; and (2) provide vegetation and land-cover information to NPS park managers and scientists for use in park management, resource management, research, and monitoring. This project covers an area of approximately 7,400 square kilometers (1.84 million acres [ac]) and consists of seven mapping regions: four regions in Everglades, Regions 1–4, and three in Big Cypress, Regions 5–7. The report that follows focuses on the mapping effort associated with Regions 5 and 6, eastern Big Cypress. Eastern Big Cypress encompasses a total area of 2068.8 square kilometers (798.8 square miles [mi2], or 511,212 acres [ac]) and is bounded by Water Conservation Areas to the east, Shark River Slough/Long Pine Key (Region 1) to the southeast, the Northwest Coastal Everglades (Region 4) to the south, and western Big Cypress National Preserve (Region 7) to the west. Photo-interpretation was performed by superimposing a 50 × 50-meter (164 × 164-feet [ft] or 0.25 hectare [0.61 ac]) grid cell vector matrix over stereoscopic, 0.15 meters (0.492 ft) spatial resolution, color-infrared aerial imagery on a digital photogrammetric workstation. Photo-interpreters identified the dominant community in each cell by applying majority-rule algorithms, recognizing community-specific spectral signatures, and referencing an extensive ground-truth database. The dominant vegetation community within each grid cell was classified using a hierarchical classification system developed specifically for this project. Additionally, photo-interpreters categorized the absolute cover of cattail (Typha sp.) and any exotic species detected as either: Sparse (10–49%), Dominant (50–89%), or Monotypic (90–100%). A total of 140 thematic classes were used to map eastern Big Cypress. The most common vegetation class was Cypress Forest. Cypress Forest communities (i.e., Domes, Forest, and Strands) accounted for 28.5% of the total area mapped. Other notable classes include Cypress Scrub (24.2%), Pine Woodlands (13.4%), and Mixed Graminoid Freshwater Marshes and Prairies (11.9%). The map has a thematic class accuracy of 93.1% with a lower 90th Percentile Confidence Interval of 90.8%.

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