Date: 5 Dec 2015
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"High resolution LIDAR campaign along the Côte Vermeille (France, NW Gulf of Lions) lays the groundwork for a new approach to environmental impact assessments"
We are pleased to announce the first successful field campaign organized by our international partnership which aims to renew environmental impact assessments. Benefitting from a partnership between Gravity Consulting and the LIDAR specialists, Airborne Hydrography AB (AHAB), we collected high resolution imagery along the land-sea interface in the extremely challenging terrain of a rocky coastline. This technique enables simultaneous capture of both land topography and submarine bathymetry data to produce a high-resolution digital model of the terrain. This model will permit testing of different impact scenarios at spatial and temporal scales previously ignored.
Examples of the LIDAR imagery collected during this project. LIDAR data from the flyover is re-processed to produce decimeter-scale digital terrain models of the land-sea interface (top image). High resolution aerial imagery is added to produce a realistic color model of the terrain surveyed (bottom image). Images courtesy of Gravity Consulting and Airborne Hydrography AB.
For information, please contact the participants through their respective web sites:
- Gravity Consulting (http://gravityenv.com/) is an American firm based in Fall City (WA). Gravity Consulting specializes in the acquisition and analysis of quality–defensible data for aquatic projects and the development of survey technology.
- The Entangled Bank Laboratory (http://www.entangled-bank-lab.org/) is a not for profit association based in France. EB Lab is an independent group of theoretical and field ecologists contributing to collaborative R&D projects in marine ecology and environmental sciences. They are particularly interested in exploring the limits of ecological theory in real-world configurations.