2019 Land cover map of riparian corridor and adjacent areas in the Colorado River Delta, Mexico
Creators: name: Gomez Sapiens, Martha Marina
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025

description: This shapefile contains a landcover cover layer that encompasses 106 km of riparian corridor and adjacent areas, from the U.S.-Mexico border near Yuma, AZ at Morelos Dam towards the Colorado River delta before it reaches the Gulf of California. The aim of this layer was to provide a current landcover to be used in a series of studies that integrate the landscape configuration metrics as explanatory variables of bird communities in the delta region (Gonzalez-Sargas et al., 2024a; 2024b; Grand et al., 2024; Villagomez-Palma et al., 2025). 

The layer was created using a mosaick of 26 PlanetScope cloud-free analytic ortho tiles (3 m resolution) with 4-band (Blue, Green, Red and NIR) surface reflectance acquired on June 9, 2019. An area of interest was delimited using a 6 km buffer from a series of bird count stations (Gonzalez-Sargas et al., 2024a; 2024b; Grand et al., 2024) to encompass both riparian (vegetated floodplain) and non-riparian land covers (mainly agriculture and urban areas), and we conducted separate classification processes for the riparian and non-riparian land cover types. To delineate the riparian corridor, we updated a 2014 riparian corridor boundary map digitized by Jarchow et al. (2017) and modified by Nagler et al. (2020) to include all restoration sites and abandoned farmland areas within the riparian corridor with > 5% vegetation. We used a supervised, pixel-based, Support Vector Machine classifier, to create a riparian land cover map with three classes (water, barren, and vegetation). Accuracy measured by the Kappa coefficient was >0.98. For areas where the river main water channel is narrow, we used the high-resolution World View base map and the PlanetScope in false color combination to delimit water. The riparian forest and marshland cover types occurring mainly within the vegetation class were identified manually and added as new classes. After classifying riparian forest and marshland, the majority of the land cover remaining in the vegetation class consisted of riparian shrubland and was renamed as such. In the riparian forest class, native cottonwood and willow remnants were identified in unrestored areas of Reaches 1, 4 and 5 by using a high-resolution basemap in ArcGIS Pro and the false color 4-band PlanetScope image. In the restored sites, riparian forest included cottonwood, willow, and mesquite.  Newly planted areas where individuals were still too small to be distinguished were classified as riparian shrubland. We classified the most prevalent non-riparian cover types (water, barren, and agriculture) using a pixel-based maximum likelihood classifier (Kappa coefficient= 0.40-0.54). Using the same procedure described above, we delimited small patches of riparian shrubland, riparian forest, marshland, and urban within the automated classification of non-riparian cover types, substantially improving the classification accuracy (Kappa coefficient = 0.86).

 

References

González-Sargas, E., Meehan, T. D., Hinojosa-Huerta, O., Villagomez-Palma, S., Calvo-Fonseca, A., Dodge, C., Gómez-Sapiens, M., Shafroth, P. B. (2024a). Bird community response to one decade of riparian restoration along the Colorado River delta in Mexico. Ecological Engineering 205, 107291. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2024.107291

 

 González-Sargas, E., Gómez-Sapiens, M., Hinojosa-Huerta, O., Villagomez-Palma, S., Calvo-Fonseca, A., Grand, J., Meehan, T. D., Dodge, C., Nagler, P.L., Restrepo-Giraldo, C., Nieblas, C., Meléndez, A., Real-Rangel, R., Shafroth, P. B. (2024b). Avian communities respond to plant and landscape composition in actively revegetated floodplains of the Colorado River delta in Mexico. Ecological Engineering 205, 107266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2024.107266

 

Grand, J., Meehan, T. D., Deluca, W. V, Morton, J., Pitt, J., Calvo-Fonseca, A., Dodge, C., Gómez-Sapiens, M., González-Sargas, E., Hinojosa-Huerta, O., Nagler, P.L., Restrepo-Giraldo, C., Shafroth, P. B., Villagomez-Palma, S., Wilsey, C. B. (2024). Strategic restoration planning for land birds in the Colorado River Delta, Mexico. Journal of Environmental Management 351,(August 2022), 119755. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.119755

Jarchow, C.J., Nagler, P.L., Glenn, E.P., (2017). Greenup and evapotranspiration following the Minute 319 pulse flow to Mexico: An analysis using Landsat 8 Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data. Ecological Engineering 106, Part B, 776–783. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2016.08.007

Nagler, P.L., Barreto-Muñoz, A., Chavoshi Borujeni, S., Jarchow, C.J., Gómez-Sapiens, M., Nouri, H., Herrmann, S.M., Didan, K. (2020). Ecohydrological responses to surface flow across borders: Two decades of changes in vegetation greenness and water use in the riparian corridor of the Colorado River delta. Hydrological Processes 34, 4851–4883. https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.13911 

Nelson, S.M., Ramírez-Hernández, J., Rodríguez-Burgueño, J.E., Milliken, J., Kennedy, J.R., Zamora-Arroyo, F., Schlatter, K., Santiago-Serrano, E., Carrera-Villa, E. (2017). A history of the 2014 Minute 319 environmental pulse flow as documented by field measurements and satellite imagery. Ecological Engineering 106, Part B, 733–748. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2016.10.040

Villagomez-Palma et al.,