A Portal to High-Resolution Topography Data and Tools


myOpenTopo

Students

A number of students are involved in OpenTopography related work:

Sarah Robinson (M.S. student, Arizona State University)
Topic: Utilization of lidar data for earth science education

Project Description:

    Recently available data such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) high-resolution topography can assist students to better visualize and understand geoscience concepts. It is important to bring these data into geosciences curricula as teaching aids while ensuring that the visualization tools, virtual environments, etc. do not serve as barriers to student learning. For my thesis research, I am looking to answer the following question: Will using the LiDAR data instead of, or alongside, traditional visualizations and teaching methods enhance a student’s ability to understand geologic concepts such as plate tectonics, the earthquake cycle, strike-slip faults, and geomorphology?

    I am working on various classroom activities and teaching tools involving LiDAR for introductory geology undergraduate classrooms. These developed tools will then be used as classroom activities to assess student understanding with the addition of LiDAR visualizations. Tools/projects I am currently or will be working on related to this research include:

    The created materials will need to be assessed to understand their effect on student learning.  I expect to see an increased understanding of geoscience concepts due to the visualization of the landscape using LiDAR hillshades. The high resolution of the data and the lack of distracters (color changes, buildings and trees, etc.) should reduce confusion for students as to what they should be looking at in the landscape. Students should easily adapt to looking at hillshades created from the LiDAR and find it helpful to look at them in order to investigate the geology at Wallace Creek other geographic locations.

    Sarah’s funding comes from both OpenTopography and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC)‘s Advancement of Cyberinfrastructure Careers through Earthquake System Science (ACCESS-G) internship program.



2009-2010 ASU School of Computing and Informatics undergraduate Capstone project:
CSE 423: OpenTopography Cyberinfrastructure

Students:
Eddie Beaumont
Jennifer Dischler
Paul Gambill
Clint Helling
Gatha Nair
John Samuelson

Project Description:

    The task that the team undertook as part of their two semester senior Capstone experience was part of a collaboration of Ramon Arrowsmith (ASU, School of Earth and Space Exploration) and Christopher Crosby (OpenTopography / San Diego Supercomputer Center) to continue work on an existing project called OpenTopography (OT).  Part of the proposed project was for the students to not only learn about and develop the processes that make OpenTopography run but to also get real world experience working in a team with people in different physical locations via the use of video conferencing. They also learned some earth science to better appreciate the target user community.

    The project was comprised of 4 components:
    1) Incorporation of the libLAS tools into the OpenTopography workflow which enable the rapid translation of ascii to binary LAS LiDAR point cloud formats.  The Capstone team’s PERL prototype was the basis of the OT production implementation put in place in 2010.
    2) Prototyping on-the-fly reprojection of point cloud data using the Proj4 toolkit again with a PERL implementation.
    3) Point cloud system processing statistics were analyzed to explore the effects of changing hardware, major system updates, and data availability. One result indicated that the average (with factor of ~2 variation) point processing rate (from job submission to job completion wall clock time) nearly doubled from 34,000 points/second in 2006 to 60,000 points per second in 2009.
    4) Increasing exposure of the OT system and its resources was the goal of the Social Networking component. This included managing Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/OpenTopography) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/OpenTopography) pages for OpenTopography. The more substantial portion of this project centered on the creation of two videos about the website.  The first gave a detailed tutorial for the OT novice on how to download a point cloud or custom DEM.  The second video comprised a tour of all the services available on OpenTopography, and how a user might best employ them.  The videos can be found on the OpenTopography YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/OpenTopography.