Fall NEARC 2018

AUTHORS: Pam DeAndrea, Senior GIS Planner, Central Vermont RPC

ABSTRACT: In 2011, Central Vermont experienced significant flood damage from storms including but not limited to Tropical Storm Irene. These storms have prompted Vermont and its communities to become more flood resilient to protect buildings, infrastructure, and the environment. The project team (Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission (CVRPC), the Friends of the Winooski River (FWR), and the Winooski Community Partnership) secured funding through the High Meadows Fund for an outreach and demonstration project aimed at forested landowners in the Winooski River headwaters communities of Cabot, Marshfield and Plainfield, Vermont. The goal for this project (“Water Wise Woodlands”) is to work with landowners, forest industry representatives, municipal groups, and interested community members to demonstrate how upland forest conservation and management can be a tool for downstream flood resilience and water quality protection. In order to reach the forested landowners that would be best to include in the outreach from a flood resilience perspective, the CVRPC conducted a GIS analysis and prioritization based on several factors that would increase runoff from a forested parcel. The Water Wise Woodland project team will be promoting attendance to workshops and demonstration projects specifically to these targeted landowners. The spatial analysis was an integral tool for this study to use science based information in outreach to landowners who could become model stewards for upland forest management for both water quality improvement and flood resilience.

AUTHORS: Tatyana Dimascio, USGS

ABSTRACT: The U.S. Geological Survey has created a new web application, called Markup App, as a user-friendly communication tool for the public and partners to submit suggested corrections to the national datasets. The first phase of the Markup application is focused on the refinements for the hydrography datasets: National Hydrography Dataset (NHD), a National Hydrography Dataset Plus High Resolution (NHDPlus HR), and the Watershed Boundaries Dataset (WBD). This presentation will introduce the new application and discuss its role in the workflow for editing national hydrography features.

AUTHORS: Patrick Cunningham, Blue Marble Geographics

ABSTRACT: Technology improvements over recent years have seen the cost of LiDAR data acquisition decrease and consequently the coverage and availability expand dramatically. As a consequence, point cloud data is increasingly used as the raw material for precise measurement and visualization of change over time. Nowhere is this process more evident than in coastal areas where shifting patterns of erosion and deposition can have devastating effects on shoreline communities. In this this presentation, we will examine an area on the coast of the state of Maine that has been subject to significant beach erosion. Using point cloud data collected over a five-year time period, we will explore the procedure whereby the raw data can be edited, filtered, reclassified, and gridded to create a time series of precise bare-earth models. These DTM files form the basis of the subsequent terrain analysis procedures, which can be conducted using a number of different tools, including ArcGIS 3D Analyst and Global Mapper. In the final step of this workflow, we will calculate the volume difference between two surface models representing the beginning and end of the time series and visually represent these differences to show areas of significant erosion or deposition. This difference model can ultimately be rendered as a 3D display in ArcScene.