Abstract

Wetlands are a valuable natural resource because of the role they play on local water availability and quality in a watershed. They also serve as a vital link between water and land because of their interactions with streams, rivers and lakes. Understanding hydrology in the wetlands is crucial to the prediction of ecological processes, due to the close coupling between the two. Identification and classification of wetlands are important as the near surface availability of water dominates the types of plant and animal communities living in the soil and on its surface. In this research, we use PennState Integrated Hydrologic Model (PIHM) to predict location of wetlands in Shaver’s Creek watershed located in Center and Huntington counties Pennsylvania, in the ridge and valley ecoregion. The predicted locations were validated against the National Wetland Inventory. We also show the effect of spatial and temporal variability of hydrologic states such as streams, groundwater, overland flow, and evaporative fluxes on wetland hydrology. “Nested-modeling” approach, facilitated by PIHMgis, was used to capture the spatio-temporal changes in wetland at high resolution. The model results were hence validated against groundwater table measurements and analyzed to classify the wetlands into three categories (1) Wet (2) Intermittent (3) Dry wetlands, and the unique hydrologic interactions for each class were identified.

Citation

Bhatt, G., Kumar, M., Duffy, C., Dressler, K.A., Wardrop, D.H. (2010): Identification and Classification of Wetlands using Physics based Distributed Hydrologic Model. AGU Annual Fall Conference Proceedings.