Funds from this grant support the collaborative development of software tools, data management needs and community training support in an effort to establish the foundations of a national facility (INTERFACE) to help geoscientists in obtaining high resolution, high precision, 3-D surface data. The facility will provide a one-stop shop for users at any experience level to obtain instrumentation, software, and instruction in the collection of earth surface data by Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). Existing TLS instruments will be made available for community use through UNAVCO. Ancillary equipment and processing and visualization software would also be made available through the UNAVCO facility. Development of software tools to establish standard workflows for taking users through all steps of obtaining high-quality surface data and visualizing results will be initiated. Community education and outreach through the establishment of best practices for equipment and software use, the conduct of numerous classroom and field instructional sessions, and establishment of a data archive and retrieval portal will be supported.
It is becoming clear that progress in many areas of the Earth sciences requires increasingly accurate representation of the Earth surface. This representation is made by capturing the configuration of the surface at scales of precision and accuracy on the order of a centimeter or better. If data are available at such scales, then great progress can be made in understanding a variety of process, including surface change, fault motions, landscape evolution, biomass production, and a host of others. Collecting these data is most commonly done by LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), a method similar to RADAR but employing light rather than radio waves. LiDAR data is collected using laser scanners that typically cost over $100,000. Two forms of LiDAR are common – airborne and ground based. The former is very expensive to employ (on the order of the cost of the instrument or more); the latter, typically refereed to at Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS), is quite economical if instrumentation is available. For this reason, a project called Interdisciplinary Alliance for Digital Field Data Acquisition and Exploration (INTERFACE) was undertaken to address many issues important to collecting TLS data. The biggest barriers to getting data have been the lack of community best practices, training of non-specialists, equipment availability, and processing workflows to create precise and accurate data. This project, a cooperation between the NSF UNAVCO facility, Arizona State University, University of Texas at Dallas, and the University of Kansas, sought to address all these issues. Best practices were addressed via field trials, cooperative processing of data, and community discussion. Training was accomplished by community outreach, such as short courses at national meetings, and preparing staff at each participants organization to teach about TLS. Instrumentation availability was in part tackled by creating a pool of several scanners that could be provided to users at no cost except shipping and insurance. Lastly, several processing workflows and data description requirements were produced. Information about this project is available at: http://facility.unavco.org/project_support/tls/tls-interface.html.
