Advanced remote sensing and GIS methods for restoration of the Lahontan cutthroat trout

Wetland ecosystems in arid and semi-arid regions are under increasing stress due to demands for water resources, encroachment of urban and agricultural land use, and changes in climate and hydrologic regimes. An integrated geospatial and remote sensing approach is required to understand the current state and expected range of variability in these systems. Here we describe a research tool called the Wetland Analysis Toolbar (WetBar) and its application in a multi-agency restoration effort for the threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout in the Great Basin region of the United States. A significant amount of research for restoring this species has been performed at the field scale, but remote sensing and GIS methods are required to scale these efforts to the species’ historic range. This will include methods for riparian mapping, determining an appropriate spatial scale for schemes for disaggregating the historic range, and developing metrics for choosing which regions should be targeted for habitat protection or restoration activities. The WetBar software integrates Google Earth Engine cloud computing directly into the ESRI ArcMap environment, enabling decades-long time series of multispectral satellite and climate data to be used within a querying environment. WetBar disaggregates the network of wetland environments to appropriate spatial units based on elevation and geometric operators and automatically tags these subunits with land use attributes, environmental data, and statistics that capture multi-decadal trends observed by satellite remote sensing. This information will then be used in objective functions to allocate the limited resources for restoration in a coordinated and effective manner.