Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences
As most OpenTopography users hopefully appreciate, primary support for OT comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and thus our primary emphasis is on facilitating access to topographic data oriented towards Earth science research. In the context of academic research, publications are perhaps the most important metric for measuring impact.
Structure from Motion (SfM) utilizes overlapping images to construct 3D models and is quickly gaining momentum as a low-cost and efficient technique to acquire high resolution topography. In this short video Ramon Arrowsmith (Arizona State University), part of the OpenTopography leadership team, provides an introduction to SfM.
Recently, an OpenTopography team member had an opportunity to assist NCALM with their Seed grants campaign in October 2014. She was awarded a NCALM student Seed grant in winter 2014 and the data collection occurred in Fall 2014. This year's campaign included areas of Idaho, Montana, Colorado, California and Utah.
This summer three San Diego high school students interned for OpenTopography as part of the Research Experience for High School Students (REHS) program at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UCSD. The students primarily worked on analysis of anonymized user behavior data as well as data usage patterns to identify relationships and trends in OpenTopography system use.
Members of the OpenTopography team are co-convening a session at the fall 2014 American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco:
AGU Session #3486: High-resolution topography for analyzing Earth-surface dynamics
The 2014 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting (in Vancouver, BC, Canada, October 18-22, 2014) short course program is now live. For the fifth year in a row, UNAVCO will be offering a one-day introduction to terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) short course.
GSA 2014 meeting session of possible interest to the OpenTopography community. Via SCEC:
T18, Landscape Records of Earthquake Deformation, at the GSA Annual Meeting 19-22 October, 2014 in Vancouver, BC. The submission deadline is Tuesday, July 29th (http://community.geosociety.org/gsa2014/science/sessions)
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Geological Society of America Annual Meeting
Vancouver, B.C, Canada, 19-22 October 2014
http://community.geosociety.org/gsa2014/home/
Topical Session T128.
Geological and Geomorphological Applications of Digital Terrain Analysis
Carlos Henrique Grohmann, Christopher J. Crosby, Edwin Nissen
Our colleagues at the Center for Spatial Information Science, The University of Tokyo are organizing a session focused on geoscience applications of high-definition topography at the 2014 JpGU meeting in Yokohama that may be of interest to the OpenTopography community:
Via the Gilbert Club email list, a PhD assistantship position at Utah State University working with Patrick Belmont on feature extraction from lidar topography data:
