gistfile1.txt

Student Research Competition
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**Miscellaneous Students**

- Eight students, eight slides, 8 minutes (+2 minute QA)

# River channel morphology w/ Auto GIS & Raster modeling
    - Avoid ground-based
    - Geomorphic Variables
        - Valley Width
        - Valley Floor width
        - Ratio
        - Valley Side Slopes
        - River Elevation
        - Down Valley Slope
    - FLDPLN Model (Floodplain model - Matlab)
        - LIDAAR
        - Flow Direction raster
        - Flow Accumulation raster
        - Stream raster
    - Fill model until the flood plain is filled
    - Use microsheds to locate river valley peaks
        - boundary lines with the floor deleted, revealing the location of major flow
        - Valley Floor/Peak/Transect
        - Table operation
    - Useful for river classification
        - Studying ecological studies
        - River management

# Developing Geospatial Intelligence Stewardship for Multinational Operations
    - Improve situational awareness
    - Ownership of the data
    - Tie intelligence to decision maker + improved understanding
    - Massive military ops list + breakdowns between them
    - Designing/Engineering interop (problem framing vs. solving)
    - Visualization is key
    - Flow of info down to locals/FEMA/local gov't/etc.

# Mapping and recovering cloud-contaminated are in optical satellite imagery
    - Core problem:
        - Delination thick cloud/haze without extra imagery?
        - Uses only green/red/near-infrared bands?
        - Apply haze-off imagery to image classification?
    - Solution:
        - Region growing & Fourier analysis
        - Expert method & image classification
    - Establish cloud boundary then region growing to find edges
    - Expert method achieves 94%
    - To extract haze, difference in Fourier magnitude is key
        - Most haze haze components disperse along X axis
        - A filter can be designed to use to filter out the haze
        - Finally, inverse fourier to restore modified image
        - Poor results

# Determining Mountaintop mining locations in W. Virgina using Elevation Datasets
    - Fueled by a documentary and how it affects the environment
    - Essentially takes down a mountain (and fills a nearby valley)
    - Environmental concerns
        - Chemical
        - Negative impact on animals
    - Elevation datasets (NED & SRTM)
        - 1970 vs. 2002 (30 year) analysis
        - Used subtraction to determine the change (both decreased/increased elevation)
        - Heat map
        - > 50 m delta
    - Used infrared satelitte imagery to correlate the data
    - Conversion to points for mapping locations of fills

# SizeUp - A tool for interactive comparative collection analysis for very large species collections
    - Compares large geo-referenced datasets
    - 3 billion biological specimens worldwide (with lat/long data)
    - Global Biodiversity Information Facility
    - Difficulties:
        - Inherently subjective
        - Time consuming
        - Distance calculations
    - QuadTrees
        - Spatial hierarchy
        - Aggregation
        - Efficient queries
    - Branch bypassing
        - Reduction of nodes
        - Speed up computation time
    - Approximate distance
    - Metrics
        - Location
            - Geospatial spread
        - Environment
            - Measures environmental diversity
            - Temperature/precipitation/solar radiation
        - Contribution
            - Amount of unique information
    - Uses Google Earth to render data points
    - Ranks collections
    - UI for criteria via sliders
    - All real time

# The Flat Map - A Perception Approach to modeling flat terrain
    - Conceptually & computationally compatible definition of flat
    - Globally applicable
    - Evaluate OSS for large-scale geographic analysis
    - Re-evalute flat to be people's perception (non-geomorphic)
    - Difficult to evaluate the flatness (magnitude)
    - Use sea visibility as a basis for flatness (and existing calculations)
    - View to horizon (3.3 miles) - angle
        - Calculate from 8 directions
        - Minimum threshold 0.32° (30 m over 5,130 m long)
        - Local slope (0-3% range)
    - 64-bit processing required
    - OSS eval
    - Pseudocode
    - ~2% of Kansas is flat
    - http://www.disruptivegeo.com/

# Distribution Mapping of Medicinal Plant - A GIS Approach
    - Background:
        - > 7,000 medicinal plants in India
        - Traditional medicine starting to use them more
        - Habitat fragmentation
        - High Volume trade
        - Unregulated destructive collection
        - Advance conservation efforts
    - Tabulated data from Countries/Districts (States)/Precise locations (Lat/Long)
    - Generated maps at similar levels + world

# A Snowstorm puzzle - The relationship between federal declrations of impact and storm tracks for extreme Midwestern blizzards
    - 1966 -> 2008
    - ~400 different storms
    - Extreme blizzards
    - 992 millibars
    - NOAA Daily weather map series + HPC + GISS + Storm Data
    - Followed each of the 79 storms & created a 50K boundary for each, then highlighted intersecting counties
    - Then aggregated these results
    - Then detailed the temporal instances of severe weather declarations
    - Conclusions
        - ~16% decrease in blizzard frequency
        - ~ 183% increase in blizzards with declarations
        - ~ 158% increase in total county declarations (spatial shift in declarations)