WASHINGTON STATE — The Washington Department of Ecology has adopted the Wetland Intrinsic Potential (WIP) tool to identify hard-to-detect 'cryptic wetlands' following the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, which limited federal wetland protections to those with continuous surface connections to larger bodies of water.

The WIP tool uses a machine learning algorithm trained on known wetland locations and analyzes geospatial data on landscape features—such as slope, concavity, and greenness—to calculate the probability, from 0% to 100%, that an area is a wetland. It models how water moves through the landscape and where it pools, enabling the detection of small wetlands in hilly or mountainous areas that traditional methods might miss. "The National Wetland Inventory, which is the gold standard, and kind of the best available data set we have for the U.S. was created by people looking at imagery. If they can’t see it, they can’t map it." said Meghan Halabisky, a researcher at the University of Washington and chief scientist at Tealwaters.

Halabisky and geomorphologist Dan Miller began developing the WIP tool in 2018 through a collaboration with the Washington Department of Ecology, the Wetland Science Advisory Group, and federal partners including the EPA, the National Science Foundation, and NASA. They refer to wetlands that evade standard detection as 'cryptic wetlands.' In eastern Washington, such wetlands are often small and may dry out completely, while in western Washington, dense tree canopies obscure them from aerial view.

"Stakeholders in Washington needed a better way to identify wetlands in forested areas because many wetlands could lose federal protections before being identified," said Amy Yahnke, senior wetlands scientist at the Washington Department of Ecology. Connor Racette, an environmental and geospatial specialist at the department, explained that the tool also uses landscape greenness data to avoid misidentifying manmade features as wetlands.

Cities in the Puget Sound region, including Tukwila, have already used the WIP tool to discover previously unmapped wetlands and refine existing boundaries to support conservation. Due to Washington’s ecological and topographic diversity, the tool is applied differently in areas such as Spokane compared to Seattle.