Survey of Wild Rice and Other Aquatic Vegetation of Lower Rice Lake Using Landsat Multispectral Analysis

Wild rice (Zizania palustris L.) is a cultural and economic foundation of the White Earth Nation in northwestern Minnesota and is the dominate species of the Lower Rice Lake ecosystem.  The colonization of other macrophyte species is of concern to the tribal community who rely upon the annual wild rice harvest.  Using Landsat multispectral data and an unsupervised ISODATA classification method, five categories were identified on Lower Rice Lake.  Using kayaks and GPS hand-held units, these categories were classified as the following: 1) open water, 2) wild rice (thin), 3) wild rice (thick), 4) cattail and 5) sphagnum bog.  An overall accuracy assessment of the ISODATA method was 52.345%.  According to the preliminary results, wild rice is the dominant vegetative species at Lower Rice Lake, but higher spatial imagery and a multi-temporal analysis are recommended for a more thorough assessment of the aquatic vegetation.