Lab 3

It is important to have proper cartographic skills when working with UAS data due to the high demand for UAS collected data used to create useful data structures such as DSMs and DEMs.  Traditionally, mapping an area required a helicopter, plane, or satellite. Those options are all costly and you might only be able to afford a flyover of a mappable area once or twice a year. Today, a few hundred dollars is enough to make anyone a drone owner. And from there, mapping is a matter of simply downloading the right software to the aircraft, and flying a pattern of the desired area, an operation that is much simpler than the traditional alternatives.

Spatial patterns are very useful when viewing data sets. They can help the reader answer questions such as: Is there an area that is denser with objects than others? Is there an area that has fewer or no objects than others? Are there clusters of objects? Is there randomness or uniformity to the location of the objects? Does there seem to be a relationship between individual objects? This is useful to viewers that weren’t there when the data was acquired or for viewers who aren’t used to viewing this sort of data.

In this project, I was tasked to create a good map that would help prevent potential accidents by showing steep angles on resource piles that might collapse. To do this, we first required images of the area in question. This was provided to me for this project. Next, I added a base map so I would be able to build a pyramid of data on top of it. After that, I added the orthomosaic layer to work from. I then add a layer showing the angles by calculating the elevation differences and distance apart and shaded based on the degrees of tilt. I then added a topographical overlay that showed the elevation of different areas. With all of these together you can see potential collapses along with how tall the piles are and the angles of the slopes of the piles.