sUAS: Adam Bolonsky

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...