Predicting Wetland Functions at the Landscape Level for Coastal Georgia Using Nwiplus Data

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources (GA DNR) has recently updated National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) data for the state's six coastal counties. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) has recognized the potential application of NWI data for watershed assessments, but realized that other attributes would have to be added to the data to facilitate functional analysis. In the early 1990s, Dr. Mark Brinson conceived a hydrogeomorphic approach to wetland functional assessment that uses comparison of field-verified properties of existing wetlands to those from a set of reference wetlands as a means of assessing a wetland's proximity to or departure from reference condition (Brinson 1993a). This approach provided the impetus for the Service to develop other attributes to expand the NWI database and make it more useful as a tool for landscape-level functional assessment of wetlands.