[DOWNLOAD ONLY] The South Florida Water Management District (District or SFWMD) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have built six large treatment wetlands, referred to as Stormwater Treatment Wetlands (STAs), in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) as part of a State and Federal initiative to protect the Everglades (Chimney and Goforth, 2001; Sklar et al., 2005). These treatment wetlands are intended to reduce high phosphorus concentrations in surface runoff coming from the EAA before this water reaches the northern portion of the present-day Everglades, i.e., the Water Conservations Areas. Each STA is subdivided into a number of treatment cells by interior levees.Treatment wetlands reduce the concentration of water-borne pollutants through natural bio-geochemical processes (Kadlec and Wallace, 2009). Wetland biogeochemistry, in turn, is intimately associated with the extent and condition of the wetland’s vegetation community (Reddy and DeLaune, 2009). Because of the important relationship between wetland treatment performance and vegetation, the vegetation communities in the STAs have been monitored throughout their operational histories. This effort was mandated as a condition of STA operating permits and by the Process Development and Engineering section of the District’s Long Term Plan (Burns & McDonnell, 2003).The vegetation communities in the STAs have been monitored using two different approaches: (1) vegetation maps were prepared for each STA based on the spatial distribution of different vegetation types interpreted from aerial photographs and (2) field surveys were conducted at a network of sites within each wetland to catalog plant taxa and assess vegetation areal coverage of the dominant taxa. The field-survey program was initiated as a cost-effective alternative to mapping for characterizing the plant community.For information about the imagery collection access this file: 2016 Imagery Collection in STAsFor details how the data was processed see the Lineage section.

This polygon feature class defines the extent and type of littoral vegetation within the northwestern marsh portion of Lake Okeechobee circa 2015. A grid-based approach was used to identify the dominant vegetation type within each 100 sq meter (1 hectare) area. Dominant vegetation types were photointerpreted from 12 inch stereoscopic aerial imagery collected May-June 2015 (1 hectare). SFWMD conducted an internal accuracy assessment of the map. The assessment was conducted both on the softcopy stereo vegetation mapping work station and in the field via helicopter flights. Dominant (VegLabel1) vegetation classes were tallied up to calculate each dominant class' contribution toward the total percent of all the classified grid cells.

This polygon feature class defines the extent and type of littoral vegetation in the Moore Haven and south islands parts of the Lake Okeechobee Marsh circa 2016. A grid-based approach was used to identify the dominant vegetation type within each 100 sq meter (1 hectare) area.Dominant vegetation type was photointerpreted from 9 inch stereoscopic aerial imagery collected June 2016. General Description is provided as a reference for dominant vegetation class of 100 m grids (1 hectare). SFWMD conducted an internal accuracy assessment of the 2016 Lake Okeechobee vegetation map. The assessment was conducted both on the softcopy stereo veg mapping work station and in the field via helicopter flights. Dominant (VegLabel1) vegetation classes were tallied up to calculate each dominant class' contribution toward the total percent of all the classified grid cells.