Case Study: South Florida Water Management District achieves sub‑meter accurate, faster wetland vegetation mapping with Trimble (R1 GNSS & eCognition)

South Florida Water Management District - Customer Case Study

The South Florida Water Management District’s Lakes and River Ecosystems Section (LRES) oversees the 17,000‑hectare Kissimmee River Restoration Project (KRRP) and needed to monitor emergent wetland vegetation across a large, dynamic area. Their existing workflow relied on paper notebooks, hard‑copy imagery and consumer‑grade GPS, which made fieldwork slow, error‑prone and difficult to integrate.

In 2015 LRES deployed a Trimble R1 GNSS receiver paired via Bluetooth to iPads running Esri Collector and incorporated the data into Trimble eCognition for automated classification. Field teams—often a single scientist—collected about 900 sub‑meter ground control points (roughly three times previous yields), cut aerial survey time by nearly 50%, improved mapping accuracy and enabled real‑time data sharing, producing faster, higher‑confidence vegetation maps.

South Florida Water Management District

Lawrence Spencer

Staff Environmental Scientist