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NCRST-E PROJECTS

Land Use/Land Change in an Urban Environment (Global Hydrology and Climate Center)
Land Use/Land Change in a Coastal Environment (Mississippi State University)
North Carolina Wetlands Assessment
Iowa Wetlands Assessment
Corridor Assessment and Planning
Geospatial Information for Corridor Assessment and Planning
Air Quality (University of Mississippi)
Technology Application Projects


Land Use/Land Change in an Urban Environment (Global Hydrology and Climate Center)
 The objective of this project is to apply remote sensing technology to estimate surface properties and classify land use and land cover change at multiple spatial resolutions to determine growth trends in response to, and environmental and socioeconomic effects of, transportation development.
 
Demonstration Phase (Years 1-2):
  • Develop better understanding of operational DOT requirements.
  • Determine extent of utilization of current remote sensing technology.
  • Develop preliminary image products from variety of remote sensing systems to educate potential users on the nature of remote sensing data and products and to facilitate discussion.
  • Develop inventory of USGS stream flow data for southern Appalachian region.
  • Develop a spatial database of resource and socioeconomic data for the region.
Analysis Phase - Regional Scale (Years 3-4):
  • Develop historical LULC classification and analyze for growth trends and environmental changes.
  • Characterize partitioning of surface temperature among LULC classes at landscape scales.
  • Characterize changes in basin-scale hydrology and relate to changing landscape parameters.
  • Evaluate the utility of using remotely sensed data in assessing the economic benefits and costs of road development.
  • Assist DOT's in incorporating spatial data into existing watershed ecosystem assessment/ management programs.

Land Use/Land Change in a Coastal Environment (Mississippi State University)
As part of this project a unified Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) product will be developed for the selected study area. Especially significant in this project will be the assessment of inland and coastal waterways. Baseline data will be developed for existing highways corridors in these study areas. Existing land use/land cover, land use and cover change, and environmental impacts determined in baseline studies will be provided to the extent possible as inputs into growth forecasts to predict future environmental impacts for existing and proposed transportation corridors. Results will also be used to evaluate the accuracy of existing Environmental Impact Statements (EIS). Major objectives are the development of techniques to utilize remote sensing imagery to produce more detailed land use/land cover classifications to mitigate the need for the use of secondary data sources to any significant degree, especially on regional and corridor scales. Also, to demonstrate new uses for remote sensing imagery in planning and evaluating transportation corridors according to NEPA guidelines.

The objectives and related approaches are:
  • Establish a historical start date for the LULC aspect of this project in collaboration with personnel from the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources and MS DOT. (Year 1)
  • Acquire imagery from available commercial and government satellite systems for the Mississippi Gulf Coast for use as a baseline in a comparative analysis of these images to derive significant information on coastal target characteristics at the landscape scale. (Year 1)
  • Increase knowledge of satellite data sources for potential use in corridor studies. Satellite data sources will be surveyed to determine optimal data sets for further study in transportation corridor planning and analysis. (Year 1)
  • Use this baseline imagery to assess the utility of both commercial and government imaging systems to identify, observe, and measure the impacts of transportation network growth on environmental indicators. (Years 1 and 2)
  • Use imagery to develop a detailed LULC classification and identify physical features of particular interest in transportation planning. Use remotely sensed data to identify both land covers and land uses along the I-10 corridor. This analysis will focus on delineating surface features such as topography, watersheds, waterways, vegetation, wetlands, and other features that would impact the siting of new transportation systems. (Years 2,3)
  • Demonstrate how to utilize multi-platform remote sensing imagery (both archived and contemporary) in assessing the impact of transportation infrastructure and environmental targets. This will include developing algorithms for data fusion. (Years 2,3)
  • Develop techniques to integrate RS data from varying spatial, temporal, and radiometric resolutions for better spatial modeling of environmental targets. (Years 3 and 4)

Project Reports and Abstracts:

King, R. L. and C.G. O'Hara, July 9-13, 2001, "The National Consortium on Remote Sensing in Transportation - Environmental Assessment," Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, Sydney, Australia. (CD)

O'Hara, C. G., Johnson, A., Cartwright, J., and King, R.L., March 19 - 23, 2002, "Change Detection on the Mississippi Gulf Coast" Proceedings of the 98th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles, California.

Johnson, A.B., Truax, D.D., O’Hara, C.G., and Cartwright, J.H., 2002, “Remote Sensing, GIS, and Land Use and Land Cover Mapping Along the I-10 Corridor,”  Proceedings of the 15th William T. Pecora Memorial Remote Sensing Symposium/Landsatellite Information IV Conference (CD), Denver Colorado.

Repaka, S., O’Hara, C.G., and Truax, D.D., 2002 “Analysis of Remotely Sensed Data for Planning Transportation Networks,” Proceedings of the 15th William T. Pecora Memorial Remote Sensing Symposium/Landsatellite Information IV Conference (CD), Denver Colorado.

O’Hara, C. G., J. King, J. Cartwright, and R. L. King, "Multitemporal Land Use and Land Cover Classification of Urbanized Area Within Sensitive Coastal Environments" IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Vol. 41, No. 9, pp. 2005-2014, September 2003.

Repaka, S.R., Truax, D.D., Kolstad, E., and O’Hara, C.G., 2004, "Comparing Spectral and Object Based Approaches for Classification and Transportation Feature Extraction from High Resolution Multispectral Imagery" Proceedings of the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Denver, May 2004.

North Carolina Wetlands Assessment

Recent advances in remote sensing technologies provide high-resolution hyperspectral imagery which can be used to identify individual plant species as well as high-resolution elevation data products that can be used to provide improved understanding of the topography and hydrology of the area. Additionally, the availability of digital soils data from U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) county soil surveys (SSURGO datasets) to supplement the enhanced image and elevation data sets provide an opportunity to conduct advanced data fusion, classification and synthesis for wetlands analysis, assessment, and mapping at early stages of project planning.

For an area in Randolph County, North Carolina, EarthData Technologies collected high-resolution hyperspectral image data and high resolution LIDAR data. The data were collected as part of a U.S DOT Research Special Projects Administration (RSPA) Technology Application Project (TAP) with funding and support also provided by North Carolina Department of Transportation (NC DOT). The study area location was between Asheboro and High Point, North Carolina in the Deep River watershed. The data were evaluated by highway engineers for use in preliminary roadway design, and the data were assessed by environmental analysts to determine their utility for the preliminary identification of areas that have a high likelihood of being wetlands. NCRST-E was tasked with developing geospatial analysis processing methods to identify areas with a high likelihood of containing wetlands.

Project Reports and Abstracts:

Randolph County, North Carolina Wetlands Mapping and Assessment Project:

O’Hara, C.G., 2002, “Remote Sensing & Geospatial Application for Wetland Mapping, Assessment, and Mitigation.” Proceedings of the 15th William T. Pecora Memorial Remote Sensing Symposium/Landsatellite Information IV Conference (CD), Denver Colorado.

 

 

Iowa Wetlands Assessmnet
Similar to the North Carolina wetlands project, NCRST-E is assisting the Iowa DOT to collect and analyze remote sensing data to identify areas that have a high likelihood of being wetlands. Multiple hyperspectral image data collections were flown and LIDAR elevation data were collected for a study area in the vicinity of Eddyville, Iowa. The results of this effort will be used along with the results of the North Carolina effort to document the use of these new high-resolution data types to assist in wetlands assessment efforts.

Project Links, Reports, and Abstracts:

Eddyville, Iowa High-Resolution, Hyperspectral and LIDAR Data and Wetlands Analysis Project

Corridor Assessment and Planning  
NCRST-E is developing efforts with various Federal and State agencies to use remote sensing and geospatial technologies for Corridor Assessment and planning. To formulate research directions in this area, the consortium organized a workshop on "Geospatial Information for Corridor Assessment and Planning" (GICAP 2002).

Project Links, Reports, and Abstracts:

NCRST-E Workshop: Geospatial Information for Corridor Assessment and Planning - 2002. GICAP 2002 Workshop Details

O'Hara, C.G., King, R.L., Cartwright, J., and King, J, November 17-22, 2002, "Remote Sensing and Geospatial Technologies Application for Developing Options to Relocate CSX Railroad from Mississippi Gulf Coast Townships," (to be published in the) Proceedings of the 2002 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition. (CD)

King, R.L., and O’Hara, C.G., 2002, “A Synthesis of Remote Sensing Applications for Environmental Assessment in Transportation.” Proceedings of the 15th William T. Pecora Memorial Remote Sensing Symposium/Landsatellite Information IV Conference (CD), Denver Colorado.

Geospatial Information for Transportation Assessment and Planning - GeoLibraries
Mississippi State University and NCRST-E are working together to develop a digital library for using remote sensing and geospatial information to create custom map products to support core research capabilities such as corridor assessment and planning. The Computational Geospatial Technologies Center (CGTC) at Mississippi State University (MSU) has entered into a strategic partnership with ImageLinks of Melbourne, Fla. As part of this agreement, CGTC has purchased ImageLinks RasterWare Appliances technology to serve as the spatial data processing engine in MSU’s Geospatial Library.

The CGTC, which is part of the MSU Engineering Research Center (ERC), is developing the Geospatial Library in collaboration with the MSU Remote Sensing Technologies Center (RSTC) as an online spatial data archiving, access and distribution system. The Geospatial Library will be a web-based source of remote sensing and geographic information for geospatial research and to support federal agencies and related organizations in conducting natural resource, transportation planning and environmental assessment programs.

"The Geospatial Library will provide researchers and federal organizations access to remote sensing data, maps, and spatial information required to assess the human and natural environment and to plan transportation and infrastructure development projects," said Dr. Chuck O’Hara, Associate Research Professor at MSU. "In addition, users may feed new geospatial data back into the library during projects for access by the public and other organizations.

Project Links, Reports, and Abstracts:

O'Hara, Charles and Barnwell, Claiborn, June 23-26, 2002."Coordinating and Managing Remote Sensing and Spatial Technology Information for Environmental Assessment in Transportation Projects," Proceeding of the 27th Annual Meeting of the National Association of Environmental Professionals. (CD)

Spatial New Press Release
http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/dailynews/2002/apr/08/news10.html

O’Hara, C.G., 2002, “Digitial Data Libraries of Geospatial Data & Information Products for Transportation Assessment & Planning,” Proceedings of the 15th William T. Pecora Memorial Remote Sensing Symposium/Landsatellite Information IV Conference (CD), Denver Colorado.

O'Hara, C.G. and R.L. King, 2003, "A Computational Mapping Engine Portal for Accessing Geolibraries," Proceedings of the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, Toulouse, France, (CD ROM), July 2003.

Air Quality (University of Mississippi)
It is important to study and quantify the effects of traffic type and volume, traffic gridlock, and urban growth on air quality by studying rural to heavily populated urban areas. The research plan for air pollution study and transportation related emission modeling over four years is primarily focused on traffic characteristics, emission, climatic parameters and other significant urban/rural/socio-economic issues that may influence the air quality models. Both roadways and remote sensing studies will be conducted. Weather conditions will also be collected at the same time or obtained from nearby NOAA record sites. An experiment design will be developed to select sampling sites ranging from rural to heavily urban areas. Other factors associated with congestion, commuter traffic and driving distances will be considered.
 
One potential rural area and low traffic site is located in Oxford, Mississippi. Three major state highways and Interstate I-55 (about 24 miles to the west) surround this site. The University of Mississippi is assisting the City of Oxford for the deployment of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) using a US DOT grant. An important part of this GIS project is an airborne laser and photo mapping of the entire city and development of a comprehensive digital terrain model and GIS. This will provide ideal digital data for evaluation of space imaging data and serves as a good example of leveraging existing research funds on NCRST-E funded projects.
 

Project Reports and Abstracts:

Annual Report, Year One: Remote Sensing Laser Measurements of Air Pollution, August 2001

Year Two Technical Memos:

  • Air Quality Test Site at NCAT Accelerated Highway Test Track, Auburn, Alabama: TM-AQ-3
  • Air Quality Modeling and Analysis: TM-AQ-2
  • Air Pollution Dispersion Models: TM-AQ-1

Year Three and Four Technical Guides and Reports

Technology Guide NCRSTE_TG004 Remote Sensing Tunable DIAL Measurements of Air Pollution

Final Report UM-CAIT/2004-01 Air Quality Modeling and Analysis of Ground-Level Ozone and Nitrogen Dioxide, Validation, and Implementation in Northern Mississippi

Technology Application Projects
The longer-term research efforts of NCRST-E are linked to technology application projects (TAPs) conducted by service providers and transportation agencies. The TAPs demonstrate how information products derived from remote sensing and related technology can be used by transportation professionals in their engineering and decision-making workflows. NCRST-E TAPs are listed briefly below:
  • ICF Consulting used high spatial resolution multispectral satellite data to detect and map environmental features.

ICF Consulting worked closely with the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) on a 4 mile road project environmental assessment. ICF used high spatial resolution multispectral satellite data as a complement to field data to detect and map environmental features for the project. The project location was in an environmentally sensitive area in the coastal plains adjacent to a marine estuary. The study compared the results of remote sensing analysis with field environmental data and assessments and provided guidance to VDOT on using remote sensing data and image processing techniques in the environmental assessment process and for environmental reviews.

Using Landsat and Ikonos satellite image data, ICF demonstrated the effective use of satellite image products to identify natural and human environmental features. The classification of Ikonos image data provided accuracy of almost 88% in the study area, an improvement over the accuracy of 75% typical of classified Landsat image data. The results of the study show that it is possible to use remotely sensed data to detect environmental feature, but this information should be used as a supplement to appropriate field work conducted to detect all of the features required under NEPA guidelines.

  • EarthData International employed advanced technology in airborne imaging, mapping, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to streamline the NEPA permitting process.

EarthData International, in partnership with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, employed airborne remote sensing technologies to create high-resolution planimetric and topographic mapping products. The spatial accuracy of these products was verified by NCDOT photogrammetrists. NCDOT design engineers utilized the data to create roadway designs. Wetlands field surveys, performed to NCDOT and USACE standards, were used to verify the results of wetlands classification performed with digital hyperspectral imagery.

The EarthData project demonstrates that high-resolution, high-accuracy data can be acquired over large project areas, and such data are suitable for the evaluation of multiple alternative corridors in the NEPA permitting process. The data produced included high-resolution terrain data, wetlands data, and ortho-rectified photography. The technologies employed by EarthData show how the early collection of data and the generation of necessary information products can accelerate transportation engineering and decision-making processes.

  • The Washington DOT will demonstrate the use of commercial software and remotely sensed data to produce products that streamline the environmental analysis process in transportation project planning.

WSDOT will apply commercial remote sensing technologies to NEPA-related analysis in planning the Washington Interstate 405 Corridor project in the Puget Sound urban area (identified as a high priority for congestion relief). By comparing the cost and quality of the results obtained from traditional NEPA data collection methods with those using the methods which this project will develop, this project will evaluate the utility of the new technology in the NEPA process. Products will include remotely sensed image data, derived and interpreted land use and land cover information, software procedures to derive land use and land cover, a cost-benefit analysis, and screening tools to identify and delineate areas where proposed transportation development might cause adverse environmental impacts.

  • The Virginia DOT will automate wetlands identification to meet federal reporting requirements.

The Virginia DOT will demonstrate that remotely sensed wetlands data, introduced early in the planning process, along with other available GIS data layers provides a good preliminary indication of potential impact as well as an accurate guide to field reconnaissance and survey. The investigation includes plans to review VDOT wetland identification processes for projects, review completed processes for Route 17, identify and acquire imagery, establish reflectance ranges for vegetation types, develop a wetland classification routine, and output wetland information. The areas classified as wetlands will be compared to existing field reconnaissance data. The derived wetland information will be made available in the VDOT GIS and integrated with other VA DOT enterprise GIS data.

  • VERIDIAN will develop a regional database for transportation planning for southern and coastal areas in Mississippi.

Veridian will develop a regional database for southern Mississippi for use in transportation planning and provide a transportation planning application to rapidly assess impacts due to changes in alignment configuration. Building on a regional database developed for the Gulf Regional Planning Commission (GRPC), VERIDIAN will add remotely sensed imagery and other geospatial information useful to update existing road information. The database will then be shared via an Internet Map Server (IMS). Existing USGS image and elevation information products along with products derived from remote sensing analyses will be compared to ground truth data to determine and compare accuracies and how these information products meet the needs of transportation planners.

The transportation planning application will allow the user to specify an alignment configuration and right-of-way requirements. Using this information, the tool will query the database for specific environmental features, calculate impacts for each feature, develop maps along the corridor at a specified scale, and develop an impact report.

URL: http://www.ncrste.msstate.edu/projects/
Last modified: Thursday January 13, 2005 10:45:30 AM -0600
Contact: cgohara@erc.msstate.edu