Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the Western Lake Erie Basin Water Resources Protection Plan. The University
of Toledo is assisting NRCS in implementing the Maumee Watershed project,
including sub watershed rapid resource assessments, watershed and area planning,
on farm conservation planning and delivery of conservation technical assistance
and conservation cost-share programs authorized by the 2002 Farm Bill. The tasks
generally consist of: annually determining land cover and crop rotations via remote
sensing techniques; combining Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan data layers to establish
Maumee Watershed Project Area GIS data layers for the project; and establishing
and maintaining a Maumee Watershed Project GIS Website to provide educational
and informational outreach to share data and information with other project
partners, resource managers, and the general public.
Crop type classification for the Maumee River project is being carried out using
multitemporal Landsat 5 satellite imagery for each year of the agreement. Images
were gathered from several time periods during the growing season to differentiate
between the different crops types, in particular corn, soybeans, wheat and pasture.
Once collected, the images underwent cloud screening and then were stacked in
Erdas IMAGINE remote sensing software package. Training sets of crop type had
been collected using a driving survey of the watershed and located with Global
Positioning System (GPS) readings. These training sets were used to create spectral
signatures in Erdas and then a supervised classification was performed using the
Maximum Likelihood classifier (see Chap. 8, this volume).
An online web-based survey was distributed among the watershed planning
community in the Western Lake Erie Basin and Maumee River Basin in order
to examine their current use of GIS, their spatial data resources, data sharing
capabilities, and any future applications.
9.4 Methods
A web-based survey was developed to work on average computers and did not
require any GIS software to answer the questions. The goal of the survey was to
discover the use of GIS in watershed planning across the Western Lake Erie Basin
in order to make recommendations for future uses of GIS and also make suggestions
as to collaborations among respondents.
9.4.1 Participants
Participants invited to complete the survey were thought to have some kind of
influence or participation in the Western Lake Erie Basin plans or implementation
of plans. The sample selected included employees from universities, federal govern-
ment agencies, state government agencies, county and city governments, townships,
villages, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), consulting firms, park systems,
engineering firms, watershed organizations, and school districts. The sample of
