Now that the digital image mosaic is complete, the long process of laying out the upper layers has begun. We'll take somewhere between 400 and 500 color infrared aerial photos and extract details from them. When these details are aligned to the same points from the global positioning system, every pixel in the image will be accurate to within 30 feet of the actual ground location. The aerial photographs, from the U.S. Geological Survey, provide the resolution needed to identify the roads, water flow and plants in the area. The researchers will produce layers of information about the region's transportation and hydrology, and another layer will show which plants grow where in the parks.
Roads are roads, but there are hundreds of different plants.
Rather than picking out every individual species in the region, the researchers developed a classification system that identified the major plant communities found in the three parks. If you were right there on the ground, you could identify each of the species and say, This is saw grass, and this is mule grass,' and make a list of species, but you can't do that over the entire park. We try, first, to group the species into associations and then the associations might be grouped together into communities. Some of the major communities in the Everglades include wet prairie and forests of black, red and white mangrove. The vegetation groupings also indicate whether the plants in an area have been influenced by human activities.