USFWS Riparian habitats

The goal of the National Wetlands Inventory is to provide the citizens of the United States and its Trust Territories with current geospatially referenced information on the status, extent, characteristics and functions of wetland, riparian, deepwater and related aquatic habitats in priority areas to promote the understanding and conservation of these resources. With growing interest in riparian habitats in the western U.S., the Service undertook early riparian mapping projects for several agencies in Arizona in the early 1990s. Additional projects were conducted for the National Park Service in Nevada, and the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming. Each project included a variety of definitions, classifications, and mapping conventions. The Service was regularly asked to map riparian areas in the western United States, but lacked a standard definition and conventions to guide the mapping.Though riparian digital map data can stand alone, it is recommended that this data be used in conjunction with the associated Cowardin wetlands data. This will provide a complete picture of the ecological systems that have been mapped. Since riparian data collection is a product of more recent times, a large percentage of the data is available digitally, though some of the early riparian mapping efforts are still hardcopy-only.