Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting NWI Maps for Elk Scouting

My job gives me access to several useful layers on Google Earth, one of the easier ones is the National Wetland Inventory Maps (NWI), developled by the Fish & Widlife Service. Here's my question: Have you guys ever used mapped NWI wetlands for planning a hunt? I've got several large mapped wetlands in the drainages I'll be hunting, all above 10k and i'll be going during the first week of bow season. Thanks for any replies!!!

I never have, but am not against it.

I try to acquire just about every map I can lay my hands on for an elk hunt.

I guess this is a Google Earth "Pro" offering?

No I was able to access this layer on all the previous versions of Google Earth, i'm fornuate enough in my profession that I have access to any layer imaginable, specifially natural resource based layers.

No, but I have used migration route layovers to define high-traffic areas.

Never used them as a hunting tool, but use NWI wetland maps for my job quite a bit. I think they might be useful for hunting, but have some drawbacks.
1) NWI wetlands are mapped remotely and the vast majority of mapped wetlands have not been verified on the ground. They are probably there, but there is also a good chance they aren't. The aerial imagery on google earth will probably help you discern the good vs. bad.
2) They are mapped at a pretty course scale. Lots of small isolated wetlands or watering points will likely be unmapped in NWI. Those that have been mapped are probably on other types of maps like USGS topos. Put another way-- NWI probably doesn't reveal anything that cannot be found other places.
3) The type of wetland makes a big difference. NWI mapped many different wetlands, some of which may be wet in the spring and dry come hunting season. Those high elevation wetlands are are often mapped PEM1C or PSS1C. Those are both seasonally flooded (snow-melt) palustrine wetlands. The former is dominated by grass-like plants with the later being woody species like willows. Here's a good key to the wetland types if you don't already have one:
Wetland Classification Key I'd try to find wetlands labeled semi-permanently flooded or permanently flooded.

good luck!

Where did you dig those up?

I found an Arc-GIS file that had the Colorado DOW migration data and then I drew in those over the Colorado Interactive hunting atlas of my hunt area and screen grabbed it. Kinda clumsy way to do it, but it worked.

http://databasin.org/datasets/d20d677ff15440c2b02033fa3355517b

http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=804abf2794b346828eeff285bffe9259

That's a great find, thanks for sharing it. Here are the migration corridor and route layers converted to google earth for easy viewing:

Migration routes

Migration corridor