Artificial wetland restoration - beginner

[Jóhannes Guðbrandsson]

Hi everyone

I am looking into ways to look at the effects of wetland restoration on a small watershed in Iceland. 

I have a 2m x 2m DEM and I am prepairing a shp-file with the streams and ditches. The streams are narrow, show I am planning on using FillBurn before looking at flow accumulation. There are multiple lakes in the system, and the streams flow from one lake to the next. Is it a good idea to use FlattenLake as well? and before or after I use FillBurn?

The plan is also to look at  accumulation, wetness index and stream power index for the area as it is today and then try to fill up ditches and look at changes in those indexes.

I am new to GIS but experienced with R and the command line, so any suggestions for this work or links to good tutorials or workflow example would be appreciated.

Cheers

Jóhannes