Restricted Research - Award List, Note/Discussion Page
Fiscal Year: 2023
223 University of North Texas (142111)
Principal Investigator: Dong,Pinliang
Total Amount of Contract, Award, or Gift (Annual before 2011): $ 25,000
Exceeds $250,000 (Is it flagged?): No
Start and End Dates: 1/10/23 - 1/9/24
Restricted Research: YES
Academic Discipline: Geography
Department, Center, School, or Institute: College of Lib Arts & Soc Sci
Title of Contract, Award, or Gift: Multi-Source Remote Sensing Approach for Identifying Environmentally Sensitive Areas in Denton
Name of Granting or Contracting Agency/Entity:
City of Denton
CFDA:
Program Title: none
Note:
Environmentally sensitive areas (ESAs) refer to landscape elements or places which are essential for the long-term maintenance of biological diversity, soil, water or other natural resources in a specific location or a regional context. Typical ESAs include wildlife habitat areas, steep topographic slopes, wetlands, and prime agricultural lands. In the City of Denton, there are four distinct ESAs, namely cross timber upland habitat, riparian buffers, water-related habitat, and flood plain. Remote sensing is the process of detecting the characteristics of features or phenomena on Earth’s surface by measuring their reflected and emitted radiation at a distance. Simply put, special scanners that work in the visible, infrared, and microwave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum are mounted on satellites or aircraft to take images of large areas on Earth’s surface, allowing us to see much more than what human eyes can detect. In addition to traditional optical and radar remote sensing methods, light detection and ranging (LiDAR, or laser mapping) has provided unprecedented datasets for mapping topography, vegetation, and man-made features with sub-meter accuracy. As one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, the City of Denton has experienced significant growth in the last two decades. However, the existing ESA maps for the City of Denton were created over 20 years ago, with limited metadata. Since field mapping is time-consuming and labor-intensive, updating the ESA maps through field survey alone can be expensive. We propose to use multi-source remotely sensed data combined with field work for identifying environmentally sensitive areas of the City of Denton in a geographic information system (GIS) environment. The objectives of this project are: (1) identifying stream centerlines and revising riparian buffers; (2) extracting upland habitat and water-related habitat features; and (3) updating ESA maps in GIS with detailed information on spatial locations, non-spatial attributes, and metadata.
Discussion: No discussion notes