Department of Conservation and Recreation
Conserve. Protect. Enjoy.
Department of Conservation and Recreation
The Virginia Wetlands Catalog (VWC) is an inventory of wetlands and potential wetlands with prioritization summaries for conservation and restoration purposes by parcel, subwatershed, and wetland boundaries.
The VWC can be used to prioritize wetlands, parcels, and subwatersheds for conservation or restoration purposes, to inform project-design processes to make them more efficient, to assess impacts of proposed projects, and to identify possible mitigation sites. The primary funder of the VWC, the U.S. Department of Agriculture--Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Virginia State Office, uses the catalog for ranking wetlands for values related to wildlife habitat and water quality and for conserving wetlands under the Wetland Reserve Easement (WRE) program.
The first step was to develop a wetlands and associated features layer by combining wetlands, potential wetlands, floodplains, and streams from the National Wetlands Inventory, the National Hydrography Dataset, the Digital Flood Insurance Rate Map Database, and the Soil Survey Geographic Database. The next step was to attribute this layer with information for ranking wetlands for either conservation or restoration purposes. The conservation attributes included weighted information pertaining to plant and animal biodiversity, significant natural communities, natural lands that provide ecosystem services, natural corridors and stream buffers, proximity to conserved lands, relatively clean watersheds, and drinking water sources. Several of these attributes were reused as restoration attributes, albeit with some weight modifications, with the addition of information related to degraded watersheds, impaired waters, prior converted and agricultural wetlands, and stream reaches with relatively low aquatic biodiversity that potentially could be restored. Information pertaining to parcels, subwatersheds, existing mitigation banks, and development was added for reference and summary uses.
The products of the VWC include the technical report (Weber and Bulluck 2014, see the full citation near the bottom of this page) and a file geodatabase (FGDB), which contains six feature classes that are split into conservation and restoration prioritizations and summaries by wetland, parcel, and subwatershed boundaries (see map samples, below).
The six feature classes include representations that can be used to display the data up to thirty different ways for enhanced interpretation and exploitation of the database. All representations can be viewed easily in the ArcMap document (ArcGIS software and license, required) that accompanies the FGDB. The two most important of these representations are Conservation Rank and Restoration Rank, which clearly indicate relative values of wetlands with ranks 1 through 5, with five being most valuable.
See the technical report for an extensive description of the project:
Weber, J. T. and J. F. Bulluck 2014. Virginia Wetlands Catalog: An Inventory of Wetlands and Potential Wetlands with Prioritization Summaries for Conservation and Restoration Purposes by Parcel, Subwatershed, and Wetland Boundaries. Natural Heritage Technical Report 14-4. Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, Division of Natural Heritage. Richmond, Virginia 49 pp.
The report can be downloaded here.
The full database is available for free (ArcGIS software and a license, required) by registering to download it, here.
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This project was funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Natural Resources Conservation Service, with additional funding provided by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation-Division of Natural Heritage, the Virginia Department of Transportation, and the Nature Conservancy.
Page last updated 2/23/2015.
