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...