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In the agricultural Upper Mississippi Basin (UMRB), nitrogen (N) pollution from excess fertilizer presents an issue for terrestrial and aquatic life. It can contribute to higher nitrate levels in drinking water, oxygen-depleted aquatic zones, and harmful algal blooms.
In this NASA- and USDA-funded project, our team turned to wetlands as a nature-based solution due to their capacity to filter excess nutrients. We mapped over 4 million historically drained wetlands using a remote sensing and GIS workflow that integrated digital elevation models, hydrologic patterns, soils, and land cover data.
This comprehensive dataset helps policymakers and watershed managers identify priority areas for wetland restoration and supports modeling efforts to assess the water quality benefits of restoration across the basin.
We're in the process of writing up this work for publication.
Used DEMs, soil drainage data, and land cover to identify depressional wetlands drained for agriculture.
Validated wetland locations using hydric soil data and overlap with NWI-mapped wetlands.
Assessed wetland loss, nearest neighbor distances, perimeter-area complexity, and size-frequency distribution.
Mapped potentially restorable wetlands on agricultural land to support nutrient pollution mitigation strategies.