Location and Analysis of Bird Nesting Habitat in the Jacoby Creek Watershed

Dave Weidling

Project Background and Objectives

I propose to undertake a project with two components.  The first is the investigation of the Jacoby Creek watershed in terms of associations of habitat types favorable to the needs of nesting birds.  Using a GIS system I will seek locations where meadow and tree cover of specific types meet each other within a specifiable distance of open water and at a specifiable distance from roads.  My final analysis, which will be conducted in a GIS environment, will analyze locations and properties of regions exhibiting this combination of characteristics . 

The second and secondary aspect of this project is the development of  software which will aid in a phase of a data processing  prior the analysis, that of selecting plant types associated with the forest cover and meadow cover preferred by nesting birds. This software will not be used as an analytical tool, rather that work will be done in ArcInfo and ArcView GIS programs.

I propose to write the software in Java for this project, make it graphical and easy to use and implement the following capability.  It is possible that in the future, people and machines are going to an increasing extent to be perceiving reality as multispectral because more information can be derived from the same instance of viewing one’s surroundings in that manner.  As charge coupled optical devices with sensitivity outside of the normal human visible range become cheaper and more common it becomes apparent that there is nearly free information being offered by nature at all times that we are not making full use of but that we could easily now acquire and use in GIS analysis of the environment. 

If one allows this speculation as to the utility of a multispectral viewpoint, then arrays of multispectral signatures will surely tell even more than an individual multispectral signature of a single pixel or location.  By use of arrays I mean the deriving of increased understanding about the significance of a given spectral signature in geographic space from the presence (or absence) and location of other similar or differing spectral signatures near it.  Here we could be said to be trying to develop a topology and taxonomy of spectral signatures.

With this in mind I propose to construct my software to allow a simple graphical query of spatially indexed data produced by a GIS system in the form of describing three spectral signatures and requesting, “tell me where meadow type A, indicated by a spectral class distinct to this bioregion and season, is adjacent to forest cover type B, indicated by a spectral class distinct to this bioregion and season, with a given number of water-indicating pixels in the vicinity, is located.”   The purpose of such an example query could be to determine likely areas that fit the nesting needs of a given type of bird.  These results would ultimately be in the form of polygons in a GIS coverage, amenable to analysis in terms of area, location, distance from habitations and roads, and type of ownership among others.            

Java has been selected as the development language for the software that plays a minor role in this project because of its object orientation.  Analysis and visualization tools are becoming based on the object oriented model (Pundt and Brinkkotter-Runde, 1998) and data itself is being seen as a collection of objects (Camara et al, 1996). Java provides these approaches to be fully realized as it is widely known to be compliant to the object model of reality.  The results of this project can set the stage for development of other more refined GIS tools due to the reusability of java classes developed here, in the development of future projects (Silver, 1995).  The available Java integrated development environments, one of which I intend to employ, are becoming quite rich in development tools if not any easier to use and will provide my medium to work in for the software development portion project.  The vast majority of the project activities however, will take place in ArcInfo and Arcview.

  This project deals with the Integration of multispectral image data with geographic information systems.  The multispectral, geo-referenced image data will be generated by the GIS system, briefly exported to a software utility for processing and then imported back to the GIS system where analysis will take place. This teaming can have important uses in promoting human and ecological welfare. Researchers in the Mediterranean are using multispectral data to understand the variability in durum wheat yield and suggest the most appropriate places and methods of cultivation for this important food crop (Nieves et al, 2000).  A more dire example of the use of multispectral imagery within a GIS system, impinging upon human life is the recent research into finding buried land mines at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Florida.  Their results are considered “quite good and encouraging” with “probabilties of detection close to 1” (Clark et al, 2000). 

After numerous field trips with my wife, a Forest Service botanist I am amazed how much remains unknown regarding plant populations in our region.  With possible climate changes and ongoing invasions of exotic plants it is hoped that the exploration of plant and feature identification within a GIS environment by using multispectral data might make some contribution to our ability to make informed decisions regarding the landscape.

1. 1:24,000 USGS topographic map of the Arcata area, to be digitized.
2. Landsat Thematic Mapper image of Northwest California obtained from USGS
3. Cal-water watershed coverage downloaded from the TEAL data center
4. Digital orthoquad, geo-referenced imagery of the Jacoby Creek watershed
5. Ground truth data from test sites in the immediate area verified by a Trimble GPS unit

The proposed timeline for this project is as follows:

Late September:   External data sources acquired and paper map digitized resulting in an ArcInfo coverage, cleaning and editing of coverage underway.  Cal-water coverage obtained.

Early October:  A clear design of the finished software completed.  Work with Cal-water, watershed coverage and orthoquad data underway.

Mid October:  Coding well under way with working importation of image data.

Late October:  Simple querying of multispectral data is functional.

Mid November:  Software is effectively finished with processing using data generated in and exported from ArcView underway.  At end of processing, data is imported back into a GIS system.

Late November:  Nesting location polygons defined in ArcInfo and analysis of location, area, proximity to roads underway in ArcInfo.  Preliminary layouts generated in Arcview.  Field checking of  data underway.

Anticipated Products and Outcomes

The primary product of the proposed project will be a GIS coverage indicating probable locations in the Jacoby Creek watershed where the bird species of interest will be most likely to nest and analysis of the properties of those locations.  Near the conclusion of the project, field verification of the results will be attempted.  The desired outcome will be to go to a location and see if the GIS analysis has produced a result that makes sense on the ground.  Along with this field checking will come a statistical analysis of the success of the exercise.

References

Camara, G., R. Souza, U. Freitas and J. Garrido, 1996.  Spring: integrating remote sensing and GIS object-oriented data modelling, Computers and Graphics, 20(3):395-403.

Clark, G., S. Sengupta, W. Aimonetti, F. Roeske and J. Donetti, 2000.  Multispectral image feature selection for land mine detection, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 38(1):304-311.

Nieves, A., D. Villegas, J. Casadesus, J. Araus and C Royo, 2000. Spectral vegetation indices as nondestructive tools for determining durum wheat yield, Agronomy Journal, 92(1):83-91

Pundt H. and K. Brinkkotter-Runde, 1998. Visualization of spatial data for field based GIS, Computers and Geosciences 26(2000):51-56.

 Plates