Fall NEARC 2024

Municipalities across the county are combining their local GIS data with federal FAA data to help safely integrate UAVs into their community. Drone enabled cities are seeing public safety, economic development and utility department benefits. This presentation aims to explain the integration framework necessary to achieve these benefits, and to highlight communities that are operating ahead of the curve.

Severe flood events had major impacts on Vermont in July 2023 and July 2024. The UVM UAS Team carried out more than 350 missions in support of rapid response and long-term recovery efforts after these events, deploying a wide range of UAS platforms and sensors to capture critical and timely data. This presentation will discuss the benefits, applications, challenges, and lessons learned from these efforts to inform the future of how UAS technology can be best applied to the next severe weather events in the Northeast, as well as the opportunities for training emergency responders and geospatial professionals on how to begin to use UAS to aid their efforts.

---

The University of Vermont is a core-member of the FAA’s ASSURE research center of excellence, which focuses on the integration of UAS into the national airspace. Within ASSURE, UVM’s research focus areas have centered around the application of UAS technology for disaster and emergency response. UVM’s UAS program began in the years following the impacts of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 and has remained at the forefront of using these technologies to enhance the efficiency for disaster response. UVM was the first organization in the country to respond to a train derailment with UAS and has captured data of tornados, microburst, ice jams, floods, and landslides throughout the state.

From checklists and risk assessments to selecting (and employing!) emergency landing sites to the importance of pre-flighting to how (and when!) to safely fly from the seat of your pants this presentation discusses some of the many lessons learned in well over a decade of commercial drone flying. Presented in easy-to-swallow bites, these lessons are easy to take, adapt, and work into your protocols and procedures. These lessons will provide good value for beginners just starting out, as well as seasoned veteran pilots. At the very least, you can learn how to recover from obliterating your drone in front of a client and still complete the project.

As communities and states modernize their electrical grids to overcome power outages due to energy sources or extreme weather events, emphasis should be placed on equity and resilience. In collaboration with the Vermont Electric Power Company and the University of Vermont College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, the Spatial Analysis Lab is supporting the mission of energy resiliency and equity focused on rural Vermont. This project is in collaboration with multiple utility distributions across the state. The wider-project's intent is to support resilience and equity of Vermont’s electrical grid by using geospatial data to fill pressing informational gaps by developing models that utility providers can use to improve energy resiliency in the face of climate change and increasing extreme weather. Specifically, the lab is mapping utility electrical infrastructure information from 2023 statewide Q1 LiDAR data. This presentation will cover the series of techniques used to classify the LiDAR point clouds and custom surface model development. Techniques included such as ERSI's pretrained GEOAI models and active learning to further train LiDAR classification models. With this research, the lab will provide utilities with highly accurate vector data that can be used for utility maintenance and preparedness. This project is funded by the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships.

Each fall, Western Arctic caribou migrate across frozen Northern Alaskan rivers to reach wintering grounds. Regional climate changes have altered ice and vegetation phenology dynamics throughout caribou habitats, preventing caribou from crossing rivers and successfully calving. Caribou cannot cross partially frozen rivers and require healthy vegetation in the spring to calve. The Massachusetts NASA DEVELOP Team partnered with the National Park Service in Alaska to analyze changes in river ice formation and terrestrial vegetation. Landsat 8 and 9 Operational Land Imagery, Terra and Aqua Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Sentinel 1-Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) C-band, and Sentinel 2A/B Multispectral Instrument imagery were used to assess ecological conditions relevant to caribou survival. The timing and duration of ice formation was assessed using the Normalized Difference Infrared Index (NDII), Relative Difference River Ice (RDRI), and Vertical-Vertical/Vertical-Horizontal (VV/VH) backscatter values based on the spectral and surface characteristics of rivers. Similarly, phenology cycles were quantified using the Nadir Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function Adjusted Reflectance (NBAR) for Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time-series data. The team produced annual freezing timelines, time series plots and maps, and composite imagery at various caribou locations to analyze annual changes. This research compared various optical and radar remote sensing methods in detecting high ice extent and high-quality vegetation over remote Alaska regions where in situ measurements are often infeasible. These study results can help evaluate spatiotemporal migratory shifts and contextualize recent shifting population dynamics.

Current, accurate land cover information is a common foundational data set that can be used to address a wide range of management issues, from flooding risk and natural infrastructure to policy evaluation and land use planning. Knowing what exists on the ground (and how it has changed through time) gives planners more information, and the better that data, the better our understanding.

For more than two decades, NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management has been producing consistent, accurate land cover and change information for the coastal U.S through its Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP), with the goal of continually updating these maps every 5 years. In recent years, NOAA has been working to establish an operational higher resolution land cover product line, allowing for local and site-specific applications. This work has been possible because of the wealth of available imagery and lidar data, improved software and hardware capabilities, and artificial intelligence classification techniques.

This presentation will review the products that have been released for most coastal areas, nationally, plans for additional data and updates, as well as focus on our most recent products (just released) for the state of Maine. We will speak to the methods, accuracy, and potential applications of that data, as well as the partnership NOAA had with the state to fund this mapping.

Monarch butterfly populations are drastically declining due to habitat loss and the species may soon become federally listed. The Monarch Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances (CCAA) is a collaborative initiative between the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and over 50 entities from the energy and transportation sectors. This agreement provides regulatory predictability for enrolled partners and aims to benefit monarch butterflies through the implementation of existing vegetation management practices on energy and transportation lands that results in a net benefit to monarch butterflies.

This presentation will demonstrate the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and mobile data collection technologies throughout the CCAA application, enrollment, and field monitoring processes. Key topics will include an introduction to the CCAA initiative, illustrative client case studies, methodology for compiling and analyzing spatial datasets, and techniques for conducting spatial analysis of roadway networks and utility corridors to identify potential enrolled and adoptable lands. Additionally, we will discuss ground truthing methods and post-enrollment habitat monitoring procedures. Using these technological methods, these projects take an active and comprehensive effort to protect and restore vital habitats for monarch butterflies across vast areas of the United States.

The New York Natural Heritage Program (NYNHP), a partnership between the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYS DEC) and the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF), developed and currently maintains the Invasive Species Tiers ( “the Tiers”), which guide management prioritization for hundreds of invasives species with high invasive potential across New York State. Each year, NYNHP runs a spatial analysis to aggregate hundreds of thousands of species observation occurrences for invasive species in and near the state to generate population counts by species, which are then ranked to guide management decisions. After final expert review, the resulting Tier values are published to a public interactive data table which provides links to species distribution maps within iMapInvasives, as well as links to regional views by Tier Value.
This presentation will cover:
1)A brief background of iMapInvasives and community biodiversity data collection platforms,
2)The process by which the Tiers are generated,
3)How these results are shared,
and
4)The impact of the Tiers on invasive species management action and decisions.

NYNHP Invasive Species Tiers:
https://www.nynhp.org/invasives/species-tiers-table/
NYNHP Invasive Species Tier Maps by PRISM:
https://www.nynhp.org/invasives/species-tiers-maps/

The Town of Branford, a Connecticut coastal community bordering Long Island Sound, was looking to update their Natural Resources Inventory (NRI) that had traditionally been a very long, encyclopedic document. The Town had a limited budget with which to update the NRI using the same methods as before; therefore, GZA proposed developing a digital web experience application (Experience Builder) to make the NRI a more interactive experience where the user can search the maps for locations of interest, turn on and off layers, print custom maps, and click web links for more information. This NRI relies heavily on mapping to tell the story while having short summary text with links to organizations that provide more in-depth information on the topic. This web experience utilized publicly available GIS data that is live-linked to the original dataset so that it will automatically incorporate future updates. Additionally, the NRI is more widely accessible to the public where it can be viewed on multiple devices including a laptop, tablet, or phone. This web experience can be used by Town officials and the general public, and also acts as a teaching tool for classrooms to learn more about the natural resources within the Town of Branford. The presentation will provide an overview of the project process, take aways, and discuss future uses of Experience Builder.