Quantifying Agricultural Flooding Practices for Migratory Bird Populations: A Test Case of Incentivized Habitat Management in the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta (USA) Using In Situ Sensors, Digital Elevation Models, and PlanetScope Imagery

The Yazoo–Mississippi Delta is an agricultural production zone and flyway for migratory birds. During winter, agricultural field-flooding practices are routinely used to support bird conservation and local recreational hunting opportunities. In response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, federal agencies incentivized flooding in summer and fall to mitigate the risks to migratory bird populations. This funding ceased in 2017, yet the United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service Environmental Quality Incentives Program Practice 644 and a local non-profit continue to incentivize flooding during fall. Ensuring that contractual water levels are met is challenging to determine. To that end, we developed the Field Inundation Tool/Survey, an integrated remote sensing approach using PlanetScope imagery (Planet Labs, San Francisco, CA, USA) to quantify associated hydrology patterns. We used the Normalized Difference Water Index and an Iso Cluster Unsupervised Classification to estimate field inundation and associated habitat types over a three-year period. The results indicate dynamic field inundation can be estimated via PlanetScope imagery. Derived inundation metrics were comparable with in situ sensor and digital elevation models among some treatment types. We documented future refinements for image quality and soil patterns. Our work can improve conservation incentivization by tracking spatial and temporal patterns in adoption and has applicability to other agroecosystems.