Coastal salt marshes are at great risk from a large number of factors, especially climate change and sea-level rise.  In an effort with the USGS, I’m working to determine how different salt marshes along the Pacific Coast will response to changes in sea level.  Part of our approach is collecting fine-scale, baseline field data in the form of RTK GPS elevation points and vegetation surveys.  Through analysis of data from a range of sites (up to 15 along the coast), I hope to better characterize plant  habitat requirements with an ultimate goal of producing improved community response projections under sea-level rise scenarios.  In this class, and in Jim Graham’s Spatial Modeling/Big Data class, I will be working with the elevation & veg data to characterize spatial relationships of plant species against plot-level factors (inundation frequency, distance to channel, elevation) and site factors (temperature, salinity, tidal range).  I have hundreds of vegetation plots per site, with about 2000 survey plots completed across our PNW sites.

Currently, I’m still in data processing mode, combining databases and gathering environmental data; field data collected wrapped up in January. However, the inundation data needs to be developed, first by kriging the elevation data into DEMs and then using site-specific waterlogger data to determine flooding frequency. The water logger data itself needs to be processed for barometric pressure and elevation. Marsh channels need to be digitized before a distance to channel raster can be created. There’s a lot of work still be done to get the data in shape for analysis, however by focusing on one or two sites, I’ll be able to explore the spatial statistics toolbox and push forward with this project.