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Riparian Area feature class has been prepared for use in FEMA's HMGP project for flood risk assessment and CRS credits. Riparian habitat as defined by CRS is “A riparian habitat area is defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) as “the area adjacent to aquatic systems with flowing water (e.g., rivers, perennial or intermittent streams, seeps, springs) that contains elements of both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems which mutually benefit each other” https://crsresources.org/files/guides/crs-credit-for-habitat-protection.pdfRiparain Areas layer for West Virginia has been created by combining two feature classes1) wvhabitat_ter- West Virginia Terrestrail habitat featureclass http://wvgis.wvu.edu/data/dataset.php?ID=465. 'High Allegheny Wetlands' , 'River Floodplains' , 'Small Stream Riparian Habitats' attributes have been queried out for riparian areas '. Original data set represents terrestrial habitats used for the 2015 revision of West Virginia's State Wildlife Action Plan (West Virginia Division of Natural Resources 2015). Terrestrial habitats are broad classes based on natural and semi-natural vegetation, but map classes are also included for agriculture, developed areas, and open water. It is based on the Northeast Terrestrial Habitat Map (Ferree and Anderson 2013) with revisions applied for West Virginia, including consolidation of similar Ecological Systems across Ecoregion boundaries, corrections of some known errors in the regional map, and integration of recently completed WV habitat map layers. This data set should be considered a broad-scale conceptual model for the entire state, with untested accuracy. Many errors are known and many others are likely to be found under further scrutiny, especially at finer scales. --West Virginia Division of Natural Resources.2) FloodplainARAFEMA- This layer is being used in WVWRAM tool for wetlands. The method used for determining whether a wetland is likely to receive overland flow from an adjacent river is described on pages 24-26 & 146-148 of the appendix to our WVWRAM reference manual, on the web at: https://dep.wv.gov/WWE/watershed/wetland/Documents/Data%20analysis%20manual/WVWRAM_Reference_Manual_Appendix55-57_v05_20190619.pdf. The combined layer is an approximation given the data available in West Virginia. |