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The Environmental Management Technical Center's (EMTC) Fiscal Year 1992 effort to develop a systemic spatial data base of land cover/land use within the Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS) has been completed. The UMRS spans eight degrees of latitude and includes the Upper Mississippi River from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Cairo, Illinois (130 km), and the navigable reaches of the Illinois (526 km), the Kaskaskia (19 km), the Black (2 km), the St. Croix (40 km), and the Minnesota Rivers (42 km). Systemically, the aerial extent of the study area includes 1,137,035 ha (2,809,575 a) as defined by the floodplain of these river reaches. The EMTC acquired and processed 1989 Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite imagery...
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The Environmental Management Technical Center is responsible for developing a geographic information system for the Upper Mississippi River System. To assure useful products are developed with a high degree of quality assurance and quality control, the Analysis Team for the Long Term Resource Monitoring Program recommended that standards and conventions for data organization, coding, storage, and transmission be written. This document includes contract specifications for the acquisition of aerial photography, aerial mapping services (contour mapping), digital scanning services, photo interpretation, vector digitizing services, and digital image processing. In addition, file documentation standards are included to...
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Landsat Multispectral Scanner data representing conditions in 1972, 1984, and 1992 were processed to identify open water conditions. The study area included the Upper Mississippi River floodplain between Genoa, Wisconsin, and south of Dubuque, Iowa. Data were analyzed to identify changes which occurred over the 20-yr period and these changes have been combined to represent gains and losses. Gains generally equate to a loss of aquatic plant beds and islands in the lower pools (erosion), while losses are generally restricted to off-channel habitats and represent the effects of sedimentation. Between 1972 and 1992, gains totaled 6,959 hectares; losses totaled 6,321 hectares.
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Procedures were developed for using 1989 Landsat Thematic Mapper data to map land cover/land use for the Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS). The procedures include image mosaicking, projection, atmospheric correction, floodplain extraction, classification, editing, quality assurance, and distribution. The mapping classes include water, aquatic vegetation, grasses/forbs, woody terrestrial, agriculture, urban/developed, and sand. Acreage summaries are provided for the 35 navigation pools as well as the open river reaches. Classification error was assessed and confidence limits were generated for each of the seven Landsat scenes required to map the UMRS. The database provides resource managers throughout the UMRS...
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The floodplain of the Upper Mississippi River has been significantly modified by man since 1824. Changes include the removal snags and sandbars, elimination of rapids, closing of side channels, construction of wing dams, 29 navigation locks and dams, and hundreds of miles of levees. Watershed changes have transformed much of the landscape from forest/grassland habitats to agriculture. We studied floodplain changes by analyzing historical water elevation and discharge data collected since 1861 and spatial data since 1891. Open water and marsh habitats have generally increased in the dammed portion of the river. A 28% reduction in open water and a 38% reduction in woody and terrestrial habitats have occurred In areas...
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