USING LANDSAT DATA AND GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION-SYSTEM FOR WETLAND ASSESSMENT IN WATER-QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Wetland is of interest to water resource management as a natural vegetation filter for improving water quality in fresh water marshes. Landsat Multispectral Scanner Systems (MSS) data for 9 Feb. 1976 were analyzed to classify spectrally unique wetland areas within the Econlockhatchee (Econ) River Basin, FL. The results showed that the scatter diagram of Band 4 (0.5-0.6-mu-m) - Band 5 (0.6-0.7-mu-m) can be used to identify most efficiently the wetland areas within the Econ basin. Both the zoom transfer scope and the geographic information system (GIS) were demonstrated to be very useful tools for wetland assessment from Landsat data. The major advantages of satellite data include the availability of new data for periodic updating of wetland information, and potential of higher-resolution Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and SPOT imagery for achieving vegetation species identification and density analysis in the future.