Our work continues out at the low head dam site in Logansport, IN. This past July we met with Dr. Jerry Sweeten’s group (Senior Research Ecologist with Ecosystems Connections Institute) and Greg Toth (Superintendent of the Logansport Municipal Utilities) along the banks of the Eel river and captured UAV imagery of the dam. Since then, the dam has been demolished and the river is in the process of defining the shape of its free-flowing channel. The team mobilized in December to fly the M300 over the site again to see the changes. The full orthomosaic is available to view. We plan to monitor the river for the next several months.

Nikhil and Joshua drove out to Lakewood, Ohio on November 10th, 2021 to collect data along a portion of Lake Erie’s coastline known as the Gold Coast. This mission is part of a collaborative effort with KS Associates, an Ohio-based civil engineering firm, to explore the application of UAV mapping in civil engineering projects. The goal of this mission was to survey a 20 meter bluff which is being eroded by the wave action of the lake and threatening several high-rise apartments. To keep line-of-sight contact with our Matrice 300, Nikhil and Joshua launched from the top of the building. The view was stunning!

Recently, the GDSL team has focused on the ambitious goal of creating a high-resolution, multi-temporal dataset of the entirety of Martell Forest. In July we covered all 477 acres with our new DJI Zenmuse L1 LiDAR sensor. Check out the results! Through the summer and fall we’ve mobilized several times to capture the forest with our go-to photogrammetry sensor, the DJI P1. We were able to capture the fall colors at two different dates and are planning a winter data collection campaign to map tree trunks during leaf-off conditions.