Klemow, Kenneth M. 1993. CREATION OF WETLAND PROBABILITY MAPS FOR LUZERNE COUNTY, PA. Contributed paper: Ecological Society of America meeting. Abstract: Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 74: 311.
Maps are needed to show the presence and extent of wetlands throughout the United States. Preparing maps to unequivocally show wetland-upland boundaries would require thousands of man-hours of intensive field-based analyses. During the past two years, I developed a new approach to broad-scale wetland-mapping. The resulting maps show the likelihood of finding wetlands on a site, based on the soil characteristics given in the Soil Conservation Service County Soil Maps. Using a flatbed scanner, I imported into a Macintosh II the images from photomaps contained in the SCS Soil Survey of Luzerne County. Using DeskpaintTM (Zedcor, Inc.), I then coded the mapping units into four colors based on the drainage class of the soil. The image from the USGS topographic map was also scanned, electronically superimposed on the color-enhanced soil map, and saved as a PICT file. The composite image can then be printed using a color printer. A prototype map was created for the region surrounding Harvey's Lake in northeastern Pennsylvania and is now successfully used by borough officials for planning.
This page posted and maintained by Kenneth M. Klemow, Ph.D., Biology Department, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766. (570) 408-4758, email@example.com.