Chesapeake Bay Region Virginia River Bluff and Wetland Extent Mapping

The Chesapeake Bay Estuary is the largest estuary in the United States and provides habitats for diverse wildlife and aquatic species, protects communities against flooding, reduces pollution to waterways, and supports local economies through commercial and recreational activities. In the Spring of 2018, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coastal National Elevation Database (CoNED) Applications Project at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) Center for Coastal Resources Management (CCRM) initiated collaborative work. The goal of this collaboration is to evaluate how various remote sensing technologies can be employed to model estuarine riverbank topography and measure volumetric change in riverbanks for downstream sediment transport modeling for Chesapeake Bay. Additional science interests for this USGS CoNED and VIMS CCRM collaboration include understanding the spatial extent and variation within tidal wetland boundaries, comparing microtopographic changes of protected/stabilized living shorelines versus natural shorelines, and examining riverine and estuarine land/water interface transitions between topography and bathymetry. The remote sensing technologies investigated in this collaboration include airborne lidar, ground based lidar (GBL), Structure from Motion (SfM) processing of high-resolution imagery, and Satellite Derived Bathymetry (SDB) produced from Landsat 8/9, Sentinel-2, and/or WorldView imagery. Long-term field study sites have been established by VIMS CCRM along the James, Severn, and York Rivers in the Chesapeake Bay Region, with the goal of returning to the sites biannually. The following child pages describe and contain the field data collected during these biannual efforts.