EBIP Grid

The ACJV contracted Nathan Van Schmidt to develop an irrigation planner for the Eastern Black Rail.  <div><div>The Eastern Black rail Irrigation Planner (EBIP) is a program developed to create and explore hypothetical irrigation scenarios to create emergent herbaceous wetlands on slopes with shallow, flowing sheets of water (upper-right picture). This document provides a comprehensive instruction manual for understanding how to use the model.</div><div>EBIP is an agent-based model. For clarity, the names of agents, variables, and files will be in italics, while user interface controls will be in bold italics. The model simulates the release of single “flow”s of water (bottom-right picture). Each flow moves downhill following a 11-m resolution digital elevation model (DEM) and can spread out into other flows if there is a large enough volume of water or the slope is shallow enough. The path of the flows is complete when they hit an “exit” which are generally either the edge of the modeled landscape or a pre-existing body of water. After all flows are complete, the total volume of water that passed over each patch (i.e., raster cell) of on the modeled landscape is summed—this is the cell’s flow accumulation. Land-covers are then assigned based on the total flow accumulation. Patches with ≥13 acre-feet of flow accumulation are herbaceous wetland, while those with ≥85 acre-feet are water. Patches with insufficient flow accumulation are only irrigated, but these patches are counted as wetland fringe if they are one of the four cardinal neighbors of a patch that is herbaceous wetland. Contiguous patches of herbaceous wetland and fringe patches that are larger 0.16 ha (the minimum home range size of radio-tracked black rails in similar habitats in California) create wetlands, which the model represents as centroids. Finally, a multi-season occupancy model simulates black rail metapopulation colonization and extinction dynamics over the set of wetlands. The flows of water, wetland habitats, and black rail occupancy estimated by EBIP are designed to be planning tools and are not guarantees of the real effects of releasing water or black rail colonization probability from any given point.</div><div>1.2</div></div>