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U.S. Department of the Interior
Across vast areas of BLM-managed western lands, prehistoric surficial rock features such as tipi rings, medicine wheels, cairns, and other ambiguous rock arrangements have lain in situ, undisturbed for hundreds or thousands of years.
The BLM National Operations Center (NOC) has partnered with the BLM Arizona State Office and the Safford Field Office to document and measure the impacts of the HX Dam failure, which occurred in June 2014. This is a multi-year effort, which has comprised the use of both Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and spaceborne imaging systems. Original efforts focused on the use of UAS and WorldView imaging systems for the identification of structural impacts and environmental effects following the earthen dam’s failure.
The BLM National Operations Center (NOC) regularly assists field offices with photogrammetric and remote sensing projects involving Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) in a variety of natural resource management applications. The NOC is currently providing subject matter expertise to the Royal Gorge Field Office (RGFO) in Canon City, Colorado, as part of an ongoing pilot project leveraging the use of multi-scale remotely sensed data for mine production verification (PV).
Located 15 mi east of Rock Springs, Wyoming (41.6641°, -108.9526°) the Pierotto irrigation diversion on Bitter Creek is threatened by stream erosion and undercutting. The diversion was constructed in 1950, rebuilt multiple times in the 1960s, then temporarily stabilized with a large cement and steel structure in the mid-1970s. The multiple iterations of this structure have slowed the upstream migration of several vertical channel drops (headcuts).
On the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge near Headquarters Lake is a small colony of Aleutian terns that nest alongside Arctic terns. Aleutian terns breed in small colonies along the Alaskan coast and in the Russian Far East. Unlike the Arctic tern and other more abundant seabirds, very little is known about the Aleutian tern. Recent analysis of historical survey data has shown a 93% decline of the Aleutian tern since 1960.
OSMRE has been piloting the use of drone vehicles since 2011 to document and monitor reclamation activities. Applied remote sensing is a priority for the OSMRE Appalachian Region and the use of drones adds value to time spent in the field by aiding in inspections, technical assistance, and increasing the use of remote sensing. The OSMRE Appalachian Region Technical Support Division conducted a demonstration flight of the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) equipment to staff in the Mid-Continent Regional Office and members of the Indiana Prime Farmland Team.
High-resolution aerial imagery was collected at Palmyra Atoll in October 2016. Collected data include color imagery for all islets at 3.7-cm resolution, multi-band imagery for most islets at 6.5-cm resolution, thermal infrared video, and color video. Imagery datasets are being used to assess vegetation composition, quantify habitat structure, identify relationships between vegetation and environmental variables, and census atoll wildlife populations.
Nearly a quarter of California’s freshwater supply flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an area that comprises marshland and reclaimed land in the form of islands surrounded by levees. The Delta is of critical importance to the State’s water supply, contains prime agricultural resources, and functions as a vital estuarine ecosystem. Land-surface subsidence and levee instability within the Delta pose serious threats to meeting Federal, State, and local goals related to ecosystem restoration and land, water-resource, and flood-disaster management.
Devils Tower, a prominent monolith of igneous rock, rises 867 ft above the surrounding landscape. The tower is the monument’s primary resource, as identified in its enabling legislation, yet its vertical aspects and summit can only be seen by those with technical rock climbing experience. High-resolution imaging allows the park staff to discern fine details of the tower surface, including erosional cracks, and provide a snapshot-in-time document of rock quality conditions. This dataset is used as a baseline to evaluate potential rock fall areas of concern.
The USGS National Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Project office is assessing natural and man-made features detected by low altitude light detection and ranging (lidar) scanners with photogrammetric surveying techniques via UAS platforms. The resulting point cloud models are sets of data points in a 3D coordinate system, representing a topographic surface. By collecting overlapping photographs, the constructed point cloud models provide reliable spatial information. Lidar surveying technology measures distance to a target with a pulsed laser, providing another technique to
