Presentation
Integrating Traditional Field Efforts and Remote Sensing to Monitor Marsh Recovery
DescriptionIn 2019, a section of the containment dike surrounding a tank farm on the Houston Ship Channel failed. The dike failure resulted in the release of a mixture of chemicals from the tanks and firefighting water to the surrounding waterways. The facility owner, working cooperatively with state and federal NRDA Trustees, implemented a study designed to track the recovery of potentially affected marshes using traditional quadrat-based monitoring (i.e., intense field monitoring of 1 square meter plots that were located using stratified random sampling). With the onset of Covid-related restrictions in the spring of 2020, the marsh monitoring study was modified to reduce the amount of in-field observation and increase the amount drone-based imagery capture. This paper describes the original study design as well as the Covid-driven design modifications, presents both the tabular results and imagery collected over the 2.5 year study and finally, discusses how the updated design ultimately increased the utility of the data for use assessing marsh injury and recovery.
Authors
Senior Project Manager
Senior Consultant
Event Type
Paper
TimeThursday, May 16th1:30pm - 1:50pm CDT
Location288-290
Prevention