| The purpose of this research project was to determine whether remote sensing and geographical information science (GISc) technologies could be used to model habitats and population distributions of the bog turtle, Glyptemys muhlenbergii. A subset of a Landsat 7 ETM+ image and color-infrared digital aerial photographs were used for a portion of Ashe County, North Carolina, where the wetlands occurred. Publicly available data may not be suitable for detecting small, isolated wetlands across the landscape due to heterogeneous landscape features, low spatial resolution of the images and the inherently poor quality of some of the images. However, the results of this study indicate that it is possible to define spectral signatures for wetlands when quality, high spatial and temporal resolution color-infrared data are available. |
