Sarah Volkman abstract: 

Title: Quickbird Satellite Imagery for Riparian Management: Characterizing Riparian Filter Strips and Detecting Concentrated Flow in an Agricultural Watershed

         Riparian ecology plays an important part in the filtration of sediments from upland agricultural lands.  The focus of this work makes use of multispectral high-spatial-resolution remote sensing imagery (Quickbird by Digital Globe) and geographic information systems (GIS) to characterize significant riparian attributes in the USDA's experimental watershed, Goodwin Creek, located in Northern Mississippi.  Significant riparian filter characteristics include the width, vegetation properties, soil properties, topography, and upland land use practices. The land use and vegetation classes will be extracted from the remotely sensed image with a supervised classification algorithm.  Accuracy assessments will be performed using a standard classification error matrix.  In addition to sensing riparian vegetation characteristics, this work will address the issue of concentrated flow bypassing a riparian filter. The study examines the effects of land use, location of topographic swales, and crop row direction on the formation of concentrated flow.   Results indicate that Quickbird multispectral remote sensing will assist scientists by providing input for modeling riparian areas and determining their spatial impact on filtering sediment.