Wetland Landscape Characterization

Wetlands are, by their very nature, ephemeral and transitional, which makes them challenging to characterize. Yet the need for characterizing wetlands continues to grow, particularly as we develop a better understanding of the wealth of ecosystem services that they provide. Wetland Landscape Characterization: Practical Tools, Methods, and Approaches for Landscape Ecology, Second Edition shows how wetland characterization tools, methods, and approaches can be integrated to more effectively address twenty-first-century wetland issues.

A Practical Toolbox for Integrated Wetland Landscape Characterization

The book explains how to locate, identify, and map the extent of wetlands to learn more about their importance to society and the larger landscape. It examines jurisdictional, regulatory, and practical applications from the scientific, engineering, and lay perspectives. Fully updated, the second edition reflects an emerging infrastructural, ecosystem goods-and-services perspective to better assist readers who may encounter these concepts and challenges as they assess and characterize wetlands. Examples and case studies illustrate a variety of situations and solutions, highlighting the use of current techniques to assess, inventory, and monitor natural resources under changing conditions. These examples offer lessons and ideas for the issues encountered every day by wetland landscape ecology practitioners. The book also refers readers to additional resources to help them solve specific challenges.

New in This Edition

• Updates of practical geospatial methods
• More project-driven examples
• A description of the pitfalls of using ecological data at landscape scales, along with solutions
• Alternative techniques for a variety of practitioners
• Linkages between field and landscape ecological practices
• Online resources for practitioners
• New illustrations

This book helps readers develop the concepts, skills, and understanding of how to best achieve project goals in the rapidly changing disciplines of landscape science and wetland ecology and management. A valuable resource, it provides practical tools, methods, and approaches for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing broad-scale wetland projects that take into account critical societal linkages.

Ricardo "Ric" Daniel Lopez, Ph.D. is a leader in the field of wetlands ecology and landscape ecology. He has led the way in novel applications of field-based and geospatial data analyses to solve current and future global environmental challenges. This body of work includes monitoring and assessing upland, aquatic, and wetland ecosystems, with particular focus on a wide variety of wetlands, rivers, and streams. Ric’s career has focused on the development and application of both broad-scale and community-based indicators of restoration, sustainability, and environmental risk. A native of Santa Barbara, California, Ric spent his youth knee-deep (or deeper) in the many wetlands and tide pools of the region.

John Grimson Lyon, Ph.D. was interested early on in wetlands as places of native vegetation. This interest was honed during youthful wanderings in the mountains and river valleys of the Pacific Northwest, California, Nevada, and Alaska. Systematic study at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels has yielded a body of work on remote sensing, mapping, identification, and characterization of processes in wetlands, and related ecosystems in the Great Lake states and Western United States.

Lynn Krise Lyon is a lifelong educator, writer, and artist. She spent a good portion of her youth playing in creeks and streams. As an adult, she has visited wetlands all over the United States with her husband, John. She abhors black flies and snakes, loves cranberry bogs, and fervently believes Michigan has the best wetlands in the world.

Debra Kim Lopez has dedicated her existence to the appreciation of literature and writing, global sustainability issues, and the social sciences. She values the importance of global initiatives for improving communities around the world; she has traveled extensively. Lopez has partnered with her husband, Ric, on a plethora of wetland and other environmental issues, ever since they first encountered one another on a common travel adventure 22 years ago.