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 Monitoring and Data Services Directorate (MDS) of the ECCC’s Meteorological Service ensures hydrometric and environmental data are collected and managed for use in applications that better the lives of Canadians. As such, MDS 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). Accurate physical information can be obtained 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 (terrestrial and aquatic) 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 ten (10) coastal wetlands throughout the Canadian side of the southern 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.
