Category Archives: Enviro/Ag
Workflow in Constructioneering
To remove workflow barriers among surveying, engineering, and construction, Topcon Positioning and Bentley Systems are teaming up. Compartmentalization in AEC workflows is a universal curse, with individual segments in design and construction often operating more like discrete enterprises than integral phases. All too often, legacy processes are plagued with a series of fits and starts....
UAS Survey of the Great Sand Dunes
The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve is located in South Central Colorado and contains the tallest dunes in North America, spread across 30 square miles. It is an amazing destination, one that I first visited when I was 18 years old and have re-visited innumerable times since; I simply never tire of its...
Disparate Data for Marine Life
Remote sensing data helps to inform ocean planning for energy development around the main Hawaiian islands. Using remotely sensed imagery to map physical and biological patterns in the marine environment enhances our ability to understand how environmental conditions change over broad spatial scales (10s to 100s of kilometers) and temporal scales (years to decades). These...
Mars Colonization: Mars Need Surveyors, Part Two
This is Part 2 of our Mars Needs Surveyors series from the Pangaea newsletter. Part 1 is here. As the dream of Mars colonization comes to fruition, what would surveyors be tasked with? Habitat construction SpaceX’s Elon Musk’s vision is to build a city on Mars (appropriately named SpaceX City) that would eventually be inhabited...
Fluid Data: GNSS and iPads
Lawrence Spencer puts the Trimble R1 GNSS receiver and iPad to work on the Kissimmee River. Pairing GNSS with iPads opens seamless data flows for a water management district in Florida facing wetlands complexity. Lawrence Spencer first joined the South Florida Water Management District’s (SFWMD) lake and river ecosystems section in 2006 as a...
Crossing the Barrier
Above: The Barrier Islands off the Gulf Coast are threatened by coastal land loss. A Louisiana university overcame a barrier facing scientific research of coastal land loss—with a UAS. “We are losing an acre of coastline every 30 minutes,” says Dr. Gary LaFleur Jr., associate professor of biological sciences at Nicholls State University in Louisiana. And...