Ground-truthing Archives

Documenting habitat

Beginning in 2005, Bob Christensen and I developed a protocol for rapid field assessment—new-age ground-truthing—that builds on timeless naturalists’ skills and adds cutting edge technologies as these emerge.

Our CBJ wetlands survey team bushwacking east of Héen Latinee in July, 2014.

Office tent at Emerald Bay, June, 2005. Distant generator on long extension cord is powering 2 laptops and recharging batteries from cameras, GPS units and radios. Kenyon Fields photo.

Field device technology evolves rapidly. Every few years I create an update of my methods and workflow: prefield prep, fieldwork, and postfield processing and journaling. Usually these updates happen during or after a chance to hang out with Bob, who’s always several leaps ahead of me at the intersection technology with boots-on-the-ground. A vignette of that hybrid between oldschool & hightech methodology is in Doug Chadwick’s 2007 article for National Geographic.

A more recent update was in 2022, during the Landforms class with Cathy Connor. Here’s a field-&-office methods summary from the course manual for that class.l

The methods paper discusses:

● cameras

● gps

● field notes (including audio)

● navigation apps

● drones

● and processing programs including: ● ACDSee ● Robogeo ● ArcMap

● journaling

● online slideshows and video editing

PS 2022

Wow, a lot can happen in the tech world in 5 years! Bob Christensen, who first set me up with Robogeo and ACDSee, has long since moved on from these programs. As Cathy Connor and I introduce students to ground-truthing and mapping technologies, seems high time i update the 2017 appendix excerpt. . . . That said, its impressive how well certain technologies have held up. Bad Elf is still my favorite GPS. And Avenza has widespread adoption by field people in many disciplines.