Developing ROV-based Workflows for Coastal Monitoring in a Changing Climate

In many parts of the Great Lakes, including southeastern Lake Huron, coastal bluffs are eroding. This poses a significant threat to homes, infrastructure, and the region’s tourism industry. To reduce damage to infrastructure, local conservation authorities create development setbacks to try to prevent new structures from being built in harms way. However, these setbacks are based on historical patterns of bluff retreat, which may not persist in our changing climate due to lower lake ice cover, more frequent storms, and changing water level cycles in the Great Lakes. This project aims to develop a “toolkit” within ArcGIS Pro to assist coastal managers in collecting, analyzing, and doing modelling with coastal data. This will allow coastal researchers to generate process-based predictions of how quickly the bluffs may retreat in the future under a variety of climate change scenarios.

Faculty Supervisor:

Chris Houser

Student:

Partner:

Esri Canada Ltd

Discipline:

Earth science

Sector:

Information and cultural industries; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Waterloo

Program: