PBS: Public Lab Produces Wetlands Maps From Balloon and Kite Flights
By Stewart Long
The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) is an organization and membership community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. Public Laboratory's mapping tools, openly available and easy to use, are putting the ability to do processes such as georectifying in the hands of people who may have never created a map.
Using aerial mapping techniques, residents and volunteers of the Gulf Coast region began field mapping trips in 2010 to document the impact of the BP oil spill. Between May 2010 and April 2011, tens of thousands of images were collected and 50 regional maps created. Between May and October 2011, Public Laboratory partnered with Dr. Alex Kolker, from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium to begin a bi-monthly monitoring of select oil impacted and non-impacted sites in the Barataria Bay region. The intent of this phase of wetlands mapping was to monitor change over time with high-resolution aerial and ground imagery.
Wilkinson Bay in Louisiana.
via www.pbs.org
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