These tasks include a variety of methods to track brown marsh spread/recovery: fixed wing transects, helicopter transects, aerial photography, and LANDSAT imagery. Fixed wing and helicopter surveys are key in locating and determining the extent of marsh dieback. Aerial photography is important to provide high-resolution imagery for studying marsh dieback in relation to adjacent wetland areas. Satellite imagery can be used to monitor large areas of wetlands across different salinity regimes.

Task I.1
Photointerpret, using stereo techniques and ground truthing, aerial infrared photographs of twelve 1:24.000 quadrangle maps of highly stressed saline marsh taken in the Barataria Terrebonne Estuary in the fall of 2000.

Task I.2
Characterize brown marsh progression and/or recovery in brackish and saline marshes across the entire coast of Louisiana using Landsat imagery for two dates: one in the late summer/early fall of 2000 and the next in late summer/early fall of 2001.

Task I.3
Characterizing the Brown Marsh Spectral Response at the Plant and Canopy Level by using Multi-Resolution Imagery and Aerial Photography Data.

Task I.4
Obtain late summer/early fall 2001 aerial infrared photography covering the 12 quadrangle maps chosen in Task I.1. Rectify photography to produce a contiguous mosaic that will show the extent of the effected areas. Compare this to data generated from the fall 2000 aerial infrared photography to conduct change analyses for the quadrangle maps chosen in Task 1.1.

Task I.6
Perform ground assessments of plant recovery and soil conditions during spring and fall of 2001 at the multiple field sites throughout the Barataria and Terrebonne Basins that were established in 2000.