In an effort to promote consistency and improve data quality at a provincial scale, EPA released the Alberta Wetland Mapping Standards and Guidelines in 2020. These standards and guidelines define important aspects of wetland mapping such as the expected minimum mapping unit and classification accuracy.
In collaboration with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) and Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC), EPA recently completed a project to test new automated approaches to wetland mapping and to examine whether these techniques could achieve the province’s wetland mapping standards. The project, funded by EPA’s Wetland Replacement Program, mapped 4 areas across the province including 2 sites in the Boreal region, one area in the Parkland region and one area in the Grassland region. This project successfully demonstrated how a combination of machine learning and deep learning approaches were able to meet the Alberta Wetland Mapping Accuracy Standards in the Grassland and Boreal regions.