Xuelian Meng
Louisiana State University, USA
Title: New era of 3D coastal morphology mapping using LiDAR and unmanned aerial vehicle
Biography
Biography: Xuelian Meng
Abstract
Coastal morphology addresses the evolution of coastal features such as sediment, vegetation, and their interaction with hydrodynamics, which is an important subject in coastal studies. Previous research mainly use historical data from satellite or airborne sensors to map coastal morphology in land cover and 3D structure, which are limited by the availability in time, location, cost, and resolution of existing data. Other commonly used approaches are field data collection through RTK GPS, total station, leveling sensor, and manual survey of vegetation plots. Although elevation profiles and vegetation plots provide insight into terrain morphology and sediment dynamics, these discrete survey methods faces major challenges in coastal environments with spatial heterogeneity and unpredictable locations with severe morphological changes. In recent years, the developments of high-resolution and protable survey instruments of terrestrial LIght Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) provide flexible field mapping tools to fill in the gap between the existing imagery and descrete field elevation survey, which have gained popularity in morphological mapping. This presented studies focus on our recent applications of terrestrial LiDAR and UAV on coastal morphological mapping by addressing the following questions. How effective and accurate are terrestrial LiDAR and UAV for coastal terrain mapping? what are the uncertainties and causes in areas with low accuracy? what are the main challenges to map densely vegetated coastal environment and how to correct elevation under dense vegetation? In the end, this study applies recently developed Coastal Morphology Analyst (CMA) for sediment change and evolution analysis.