Recent work by Rohde et al (2024; "Establishing Ecological Thresholds and Targets for Groundwater Management.” Nature Water 2: 312–23) proposes using the relationship between greenness and groundwater well depth to quantify how dependent a riparian plant community is on groundwater. Regression of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) on depth to groundwater (DTG) is expected to show a strongly negative relationship in groundwater dependent ecosystems (GDE). We use this approach to examine factors that may be affecting wildlife habitat quality. Using DTG data from 28 sites in riparian habitat along the South Fork Kern River, we generated these regressions to compare this relationship between sites with different distance to actively managed irrigation wells. We consider different ways to standardize NDVI and DTG to compare across sites and years. We demonstrate that this method can be very useful for identifying sites that are more groundwater dependent. We also show that this approach can identify water depth thresholds to be used as triggers for limiting groundwater pumping. We discuss how these methods might be used in wildlife conservation using the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo as an example.