Soil and Water Conservation Society2016 Annual ConferenceLouisville KY – Galt HouseTuesday July 26th, 2016

Demetrio P. Zourarakis, Ph.D., GISP, CMS‐RS, CMS‐GIS/LIS

Erosional Pattern Recognitionor

Saving Dollars with GIS and Remote Sensing 

or‘Information’ (as opposed to ‘data’) 

Conservationor

Spatial Intelligence in Conservationor...

$aving$ because...

• Shrinking budgets• Staffing issues• Changing climate patterns

• GIS (geospatial)+ IT ...– Cloud– UAV/sUAS– Next Gen LiDAR– IoT– Etc. etc. etc.

The case for photointerpretation

• Available data– NAIP (4‐band, 8 bit, biennial, 1‐meter)– LiDAR

• Data/Information layers – REST services– Readily available– Cloud storage

• Image enhancement– COTS– Open Source

The case for image classification/feature extraction

• Processing power and memory capacity– Ubiquitous

• Data/Information layers – REST services– Readily available– Cloud storage

• Image enhancement– COTS– Open Source

Where to begin?

• Keep in mind objectives– Soil erosion control?– Streambank restoration?

• Extent (“scale”) of Area of Interest?

Examples

Active Soil Erosion

• Hopkins County• Western Coal Field Region• Green River Basin• 2014 NAIP• 2014 KYAPED• 5‐foot LiDAR DEM

Streambank Erosion

• Scott County• Inner Bluegrass Region• Kentucky River Basin• 2012 NAIP• 2012 KYAPED• 5‐foot LiDAR DEM

Erosion/Karst 

• Shelby County• Outer Bluegrass Region• Lower Ohio ‐ Salt River Basin• 2012 NAIP• 2012 KYAPED• 5‐foot LiDAR DEM

Where to...?

TWO ACRONYMS TO KNOW –building blocks in the Cloud!

REST: Representational State Transfer – a simple, open Web interface to access services hosted by ArcGIS Server

URL: Uniform Resource Locator – a Web address – such as that for the endpoint for a GIS service published to ArcGIS Server:

• http://kygisserver.ky.gov/arcgis/rest/services(Web Mapping Services: e.g. KY Schools service)

• http://kyraster.ky.gov/arcgis/rest/services(Image Services: e.g. Imagery and Terrain)

• http://services.nationalmap.gov/arcgis/rest/services(Geonames)

Zourarakis ‐ 28

http://kyraster.ky.gov/arcgis/rest/services/ElevationServices

http://kyraster.ky.gov/arcgis/rest/services/ElevationServices/Ky_DEM_KYAPED_5FT_ShadedRelief/ImageServer

Tile Selection Tool (under development)

Courtesy: Hexagon Geospatial

UAV/UAS or “Drones”• Disruptive technology• DIM (Dense or High Density Image Matching)• Point Clouds (Elevation) *from images*• Not LiDAR

http://www.ifp.uni‐stuttgart.de/forschung/Photogrammetry_ComputerVision/Dense_Matching/index.en.html

http://www.gim‐international.com/content/article/automatic‐point‐cloud‐generation‐and‐3d‐modelling‐from‐aerial‐images

https://www.sensefly.com/home.html

Thank you!

Questions?