As part of the Government of Canada’s Great Lakes Protection Initiative (GLPI), Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) will be assessing the vulnerability of Great Lakes coastal wetlands to climate change. The impact climate change will have on wetlands within the Great Lakes basin is not well understood, but a loss of wetland ecosystem services is anticipated. The Great Lakes Ecosystem Management Section (GLEM) of the ECCC’s Strategic Policy Branch leads the development and implementation of actions related to Habitat and Species to deliver on Canada’s obligations under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA). As such, GLEM has a vested interest in determining how climate change will impact the function of Great Lakes coastal wetlands and identifying adaptive measures to increase wetland resilience.
Modelling the response of coastal wetland vegetation communities to climate change is an effective method for predicting vulnerability and requires accurate physical information (topography and bathymetry) to develop Digital Elevation Models (DEM). DEMs can be developed through Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), which has been performed at some locations across the Great Lakes basin. However, within Great Lakes coastal wetlands, turbidity and areas of dense vegetation commonly result in inaccurate reflectance readings. As such, it is necessary to: (i) collect precise field-based topographic data to correct terrestrial LiDAR data; and, (ii) undertake boat-based bathymetric surveys to collect underwater elevation data.
ECCC requires the one-time collection and delivery of raw and processed topographic and bathymetric data from nine (9) coastal wetlands throughout the Canadian side of the northern Great Lakes basin. Moreover, ECCC requires the topographic surveys to be conducted along predetermined transects and the bathymetric surveys to be conducted with spatially explicit polygons.
