Natural Resources and Disaster Management Workshops

This year's FOSS4G NA conference focuses on natural resources and disaster management issues. Two workshops apply task-based remote sensing to develop actionable data for decision support.  

Detecting, mapping, and taxonomically classifying trees using RGB drone imagery 

Over the last decade, there has been a remarkable proliferation of scientific drone capabilities. There are inexpensive, highly capable UAV solutions on the market.  At this point, many natural resource organizations will have the capacity to collect imagery with UAV’s. Developing functional decision support systems with these tools remains challenging.  The Open Forest Observatory project is an effort to make UAV-derived photogrammetric point clouds relevant to forest managers.  In this workshop, participants will progress through several tools that the OFO team has put together.  Using cloud-hosted computational resources, participants can work through several of these tools.  

Geohazard Change Detection for Emergency Management with GRASS 

GRASS provides robust analytical tools to quantify landscape impacts during a “cascading” natural disaster.  This workshop will demonstrate quantitative geomorphic change detection from extreme precipitation and post-fire flooding.  This kind of analysis is important for mitigating the impacts of recent disasters and managing future geotechnical hazards.  All surveying methods have uncertainty. LIDAR and photogrammetric methods are no different.  It is important to propagate uncertainty through your analysis. This workshop will lead participants through the process of managing uncertainty and co-registration issues between sequential topographic models.   

See the full agenda here.