Making airborne mapping work
elevation data required for accurate flood modelling. Even now the majority of LIDAR data are acquired for this purpose. Due to this flood modelling requirement, today there is an extensive baseline of detailed elevation data within the UK, particularly of the coastal zone and flood plains. These baseline data are now being used for a variety of purposes that were not anticipated when the data were acquired, such as coastal morphology change mapping, vegetation mapping, insolation studies, illegal waste mapping, flood defence assessment, electricity line assessment and mapping archaeology.
Dr Kyle Brown (Senior Geomatics Analyst, Environment Agency Geomatics Group)
Remote sensing in the UK has a chequered history, with both notable successes and failures to deliver claimed outcomes. The remote sensing industry has been guilty of failing to engage with end users, delivering technology lead products, rather than working towards solutions based on user requirements. In recent years this has changed, partially due to end users becoming more knowledgeable of the limitations and advantages of remote sensing and partially due to greater engagement and interaction of the remote sensing community with those end users. This has enabled projects and their outputs to be driven by user requirements, rather than technological advances or specific research interests of those analysing the remotely sensed data. Successful projects tend to have interaction between the stakeholders at all stages, rather than just at the beginning and end of the project. This enables user input to define variables and conditions, tweaks to be applied to products and ensures that outputs meet user needs, rather than analysts’ perception of user needs.
At the same time as greater interaction, technological developments in remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have also increased mapping possibilities. This has allowed the development of products ideally targeted at end user requirements. One of the major technologies that have made the use of remote sensing a more operational option is LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). Environment Agency Geomatics Group had the first UK based LIDAR system and started acquiring LIDAR data in 1996. Since that time LIDAR has moved from a niche product, viewed with some suspicion, to the work horse of UK remote sensing. LIDAR data were first acquired in the UK to provide the fine resolution, high precision
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Environment Agency Geomatics Group has strong links with Natural England, one of the government’s advisors on the natural environment. One area of interest to them is morphological change at environmentally sensitive coastal sites around England. Traditionally, coastal zone monitoring over large areas has been carried out using ground based surveys along lines or transects. The limitation of this approach is that between the survey lines there are no data, providing very limited and possibly unrepresentative information on morphological changes. As there are LIDAR data for more than 95% of the coast of England and Wales, in many cases there is an accurate baseline that may be used for mapping change. Elevation change maps are relatively easy to produce and these may be used to provide outputs such as sediment volume change estimates. They can also be used to map changes in position of the coast and development of morphological features such as gravel bars, sand dunes and shingle ridges. Providing complete, continuous coastal morphological change data to Natural England means they are able to make more informed decisions about management of sites and can use these data to educate the public about coastal processes.
Image - Frontal sand dune & intertidal elevation change (2000-2009), red & pink = erosion, blue = accretion, North east coast
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