sUAS: Adam Bolonsky

What I'm working on: One of the benefits of working with small local non-profit conservation groups is access to their data resources. Recently I've been working with the Cape Ann Vernal Pond Team , a loose coalition of Gloucester and Rockport, Massachusetts residents who certify vernal pools in the area. A while ago, I took home their two GPS unit to download the dataset of the vernal pools they've visited and certified over the past decade or so. What a treasure trove! The organization's two principal pool certifiers, Rick Roth and Nick Taormina, who work in the building trades, spend early spring afternoons seeking out the vernal pools located in the state of Massachusetts  sdatabase of potential vernal pools. The two guys aren't very savvy with digital tools. Their gps units contained a few hundred waypoints that hadn't been transferred to a database or uploaded into Google Maps. And that's what they were: latitude and longitude data points

The multiple blue pin above show GPS coordinates I captured in Rockport, Massachusetts with Nick Toarmina, president of the  Cape Ann Vernal Pond Team , and Linda Ireland, a volunteer with the Massachusetts Audubon . There are hundreds of vernal pools on Cape Ann. The is comprised primarily of granite bedrock. Winter precipitation is significant - resulting in lots of snowmelt. The area above, Pigeon Hill, was once the location of a few dozen granite quarries. Nick and Linda and I hiked the area to document several potential vernal pools listed in the Massachusetts OLIVER system , a many-layered GIS archive. OLIVER's predictive algorithms take into account depressions in the landscape, proximity to bedrock, slopes, and elevations. Sometimes the predictions turn out to be little more than culverts or drainage ditch. I periodically pull potential vernal pool locations from the database to assist the team in the field. They take the field notes, I do the orienteering and fly t

What I'm working on: Until the late 1980's or so, coastal shoreline homeowners were encouraged to pile up Christmas trees at the base of dunes. Local departments of public works assisted; participants assumed the discarded trees reinforced te dunes against erosion. The theory: the vortexes the discarded trees created in the wind broke up airflow, causing sand particles to drop in place in and behind the trees. Methods have changed since. The present trend is snow fencing and beachgrass planting. Some experiments have shown that upright pieces of split shingles do the same. Recently I borrowed the local cable access station's DJI Spark to see what it was like to fly, and see what its video looked like. Here's raw footage I shot with the Spark of a barrier dune that divides a coastal bay from an estuarine marsh. Notice the chopped telephone poles once used for chainlink fence dune enforcement. Homeowners piled up their discarded Christmas trees behind the

NOAA placed online its library of historical charts,  historical to us primarily because the charts are shorn of the level of detail we have expect from modern charts. We get a look at how our waters were represented to fishermen, packet clippers, trade shipping interests during previous centuries. Here is a mid-nineteenth century version of a chart section of Gloucester, Massachusetts .  At the time of this chart's printing, Gloucester was one of the world's busiest fishing ports. Its fleet of fishing schooners numbered in the thousands.  To enlarge this charming piece of art, click on it. Pretty humble art for what was at that time a busy port whose fishing made past the northeastern tip of Cape Ann for fishing grounds to the east and north: There's a lot to note here. One is that Eastern Point was once called East Point, and lacked the long breakwater which gives Gloucester an inner and an outer harbor. Another is that the lighthouse at Eastern Point, and the light atTen

What I'm working on:  I'm learning DJI GS Pro  to plan and run mapping flights using a Mavic Pro, a Phantom 4 Professional, and WebODM . Here are the results of the flight I ran at Milk Island off Rockport, Massachusetts. After kayaking there and running my ortho flight with GS Pro, I went home and processed the images using WebODM installed on MacBook Pro. Above : Milk Island,  Rockport, Massachusetts, showing elevations created via DJI GS Pro, a Mavic Pro drone, and WebODM. Above :  Commonwealth of Massachusetts orthomosaic of Milk Island   Workflow: install DJI GS Pro on an iPad connect the iPad to your flight controller collect image data using your DJI drone  download the images to a desktop computer upload the images to WebODM for orthomosaic stitching process the orthomosaic using WebODM's elevation filter display orthomosaic model as above Advantages of the workflow: DJI GS Pro and WebODM are free  using them is intuituve Disadvantages of the workflow: