Lidar Scans of the White River near Worthington, Indiana, U.S.A.: Supporting data for Martin et al. (2024)

Supporting data for the manuscript "Four years of meander-bend evolution captured by drone-based lidar reveals lack of width maintenance on the White River, Indiana, USA" by Harrison K Martin, Douglas A Edmonds, and Quinn W Lewis. As of June 2024, the manuscript has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface and is available here: https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JF007574. You can find additional details in the Supplemental Information for that paper.

Also of interest may be another recently published manuscript (in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms) on a pair of failed dams from central Michigan where we quantified topographic change using lidar change detection. On that study, we compared an airborne pre-flood survey to three post-flood drone-based lidar surveys we collected. The methods employed were not identical to this study (namely, there we used a point cloud to point cloud differencing method rather than the differences of DEMs used here), but there could be some helpful information in that manuscript's Supporting Info. It's available here: https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.5855.

In this repository you will find 22 bare-earth Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of a single river bend on the meandering White River near Worthington, IN. The scans were collected over a period of ~4.5 years between April 2018 and November 2022 -- not coincidentally, nearly the same span of time as my PhD. Each DEM attempts to present the bare earth as if the vegetation were not present; the algorithms and trimming do a better job on tall, forested canopies (such as the northeastern-most part of the point bar) than on short, dense, shrubby grasses (such as certain parts of the cutbank or where crops were grown). The vegetation noise and artifacts will be the greatest in the summer months and the least in the winter. The point bar surface was always well-resolved. The actual river/water surface itself was masked out manually for each of the 22 scans, with null values defined for these and other no-data areas. The filename of each scan describes the date of collection. The cell size for each raster is 25 cm and was created by exporting a triangular lattice constructed from a ground-classified point cloud with a maximum length of 10 meters. Because of this, areas with very low point density (such as the outer boundaries of each scan, outside of the areas where we wanted to measure geomorphic changes) appear to be made of large triangles, and should not be trusted. The CRS for each is NAD83 / UTM zone 16N [https://epsg.io/26916].

Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions, requests, etc! I'm pretty responsive by email (hkm@caltech.edu) and website form (https://harrison.studies.rocks). If you have any questions about the methods, setting up your own drone-based lidar program, or are struggling with some of the arcane software and quirks of this sort of workflow... there is a chance that I've struggled through it before and am happy to share whatever I have learned!

Thanks for stopping by!

Acknowledgements:

A big thanks is owed to Steve Scott of Indiana University, our stalwart drone pilot without whom none of this would have been possible. HKM was supported by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant 80NSSC21K1598 and a California Institute of Technology Geological and Planetary Sciences Geology Option Postdoctoral position. DAE was supported by National Sciences Foundation grant EAR-2321056. QWL was supported by a University of Waterloo New Faculty Starter Grant. All authors were supported by the Environmental Resilience Institute, funded by Indiana University’s Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge initiative.

UPDATES:
- 2024-04-29: Added Supporting Tables S1-S6.
- 2024-05-04: Updated some column headers in Supporting Tables S1-S6.
- 2024-05-08: Made public, updated the first paragraph (including changing manuscript status to accepted), and added contact information for further inquiries.
- 2024-06-20: Added DOI link to published manuscript in JGR:ES. Added a reference to our ESPL paper for those interested in more methodology details. Expanded the description of how the data were collected and processed, as well as my contact information, to make the repository a bit more user-friendly.