Creston Valley Wildlife Management Area - Land Cover Inventory

SGRC Lead Researcher: Chris Gray

SGRC Researcher: Wayne Condon

Collaborating Agency: Creston Valley Wildlife Management Area

The Creston Wildlife Management Area covers 17,000 acres of land and water with a small staff and operations budget which has proved challenging to manage the dynamic wetlands landscape effectively. The ability to have access to current base mapping layers of vegetation and infrastructure on the ground was desirable to provide the tools that will support their management and expenditure decision making.  It would also provide a quantifiably land cover in order to monitor the change over time as a major concern was emergent vegetation and habitat lose for migratory bird species.  

High-resolution orthophotography for remote sensing image classification was investigated to determine the potential application for producing accurate land cover classes however, the findings indicated that while there is potential, the imagery available was not suitable due to the different visible spectral values between images.  A more tactile approach using heads-up digitizing was employed to classify the entire management area into 9 land cover classes. Maps and land cover statistics were produced along with a web-based interactive map service of the land cover layers which is accessible to the CVWMA staff for planning surveys, field navigation and overlaying GPS survey data.  Further research and development could include doing comparative analysis with this base-line inventory to determine the change (and rate of change) of land-cover and also extrapolating bird survey data to determine to effects of this land cover change is having on these populations. 

Web Mapping Service: http://www.sgrc.selkirk.ca/imf5_2/imf.jsp?site=cvwma

CVWMA Land Cover Poster Map - 13MB PDF