Hey Everyone,

I am a graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I saw this posting and got very excited.

Last semester, my colleague VIneet Diwadkar and myself tried deploying a similar method of using a pole to map the Bussey Brook Bed Stream at the Harvard Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, MA. We produced a research paper for a class taught by Prof. Peter Del Tredici, former Director of Living Collections and Senior Research Scientist at the Arnold Arboretum.

We used the images captured by the GoPro to make 3D point clouds. One of our conclusions was that in order to better map the stream in 3D we need a higher rod that can produce higher overlap between the images.

Here is the research paper with out findings:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HXDU2u8xr4R2TSYMttNKnA-QUJ7089l-j9F59TSsGTA/edit?usp=sharing

If you do not have time to go over the paper, here are our summarized findings:

-The Bussey Brook stream was scanned wherever there was foot access to place the camera within direct sight of the stream. -Our method produced higher resolution color point clouds when compared with the NOAA Coastal Lidar and the UAV of the Hemlock Hills. -However, the point clouds produced had low degrees of internal correspondence, high degrees of distortion on the edges, and low degree of geolocation accuracy due to a low resolution GPS. -Future development should help improve the methodology that can support decision-making ability by personnel at the Arnold Arboretum in managing and intervening within current challenges at the Bussey Brook Stream.

Looking forward to new developments for pole mapping...

Best, Héctor

Hi Hector! Thanks for the post!! If you're not yet, you should follow the #polemapping to be sure to get updates when anyone on Public Lab posts about it! (http://publiclab.org/tag/polemapping) -Stevie