Boots on the Ground, Drones in the Air
Using specialized sensors and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), students and faculty in the Department of Geography and Sustainability are collecting data and building digital models that aid area park managers.
These Volunteers from Tennessee’s flagship land-grant university are serving Knoxville’s most-visited park, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), and Cherokee National Forest, while preparing for evolving careers in the workforce.
Working with local partners, UT faculty tailor projects to answer their needs while advancing the state of the science, integrating cutting-edge technology into the approach, and sparking students’ curiosity.
Faculty in the department have been training students to use terrestrial laser scanners for more than a decade, as they learn how to gather, process, and analyze geospatial data. Today, light detecting and ranging equipment, known as lidar, is used to detect surface changes, such as erosion, and create digital archives of buildings, bridges, and other structures. It can also scan through visible obstacles like vegetation.
“Lidar is a cutting-edge technology to the geospatial industry with many new job opportunities,” saidYingkui Li, a professor of physical geography and geographical information system technology (GIST). Lidar is heavier than other types of sensors, which required the department to add a heavy-lift drone to its other UAVs in 2024 to expand its capabilities.
“There is a huge demand for qualified UAV pilots to work in fields like surveying, GIST, emergency response, utilities, construction, and others,” said Michael Camponovo, director of the department’s GIST program and GIS outreach coordinator.
Mapping and Training
In December 2024, students and faculty put the new UAV to work for the first time at Knoxville’s 185-acre Lakeshore Park, piloted by GIS Lab Manager Tim Kane. Using lidar and a multispectral sensor, they are creating detailed, three-dimensional models and updated maps that will help the city with planning in areas such as erosion control. The data gathered also will be used to train students in classes at UT.
“We are always looking for ways where our research interests can align with the needs of Knoxville-Knox County Planning,” Camponovo said. “This project is helping us to both train those students to be safe, responsible, and qualified pilots, and also helping us establish our best practices and protocols for similar missions in the future.”
Undergraduate and graduate students learn how to plan the mission, operate the equipment safely, deal with factors such as high winds, and use the data.The department’s Ralston Outreach Fund will support students’ sharing knowledge, standard operating procedures, best practices, and results with a wider audience through technical demonstrations and conferences.
Collin Davis, an undergraduate studying physical geography, is a student worker in UT Facilities Services working with GIS. “I plan to use what I learn from this project to help me use lidar to scan buildings and create a digital twin of campus,” he said.
Master’s student Dryver Finch learned not only how the technology works, but how to make adjustments in the field. It was his first opportunity to work on image collection. He is working with Kane to develop workflows for all the department’s UAVs.
The heavy-lift UAV and lidar also are being used in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service in Cherokee National Forest.
Physical geography Assistant Professor Anna Marshall and master’s student Hope Hutchinson are monitoring the land before and after restoration following the removal of a dam near Tellico Plains. “By flying repeat lidar, we’ll be able to document how some of the physical attributes of the river respond to restoration activities,” Marshall said.
Help After Hurricane Helene
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, the department launched new projects with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a longtime partner.
The Cataloochee Valley suffered some of the most severe damage from the record-setting rains in September 2024, with roads washed out and trails and campsites flooded. Marshall is also the principal investigator for the project using the UAV and lidar there, and undergraduate Ella Saunders has a department research award to support her work.
“Any sediment or wood that has been deposited or any locations where the river has shifted position will all be captured in our data,” Marshall said. Comparing the new data to previous lidar measurements will show what areas have had the greatest changes through erosion and deposition, for example. “That information is useful for understanding what areas of the watershed are trapping the most post-flood inputs as well as what locations might be more likely to experience change in the future.”
“Both projects are in remote areas where there isn’t road access as you get into the steeper mountainous terrain,” Marshall said. “We’ll collect field data on the ground in those locations that are less feasible to take-off or land a UAV from. Using UAV technology paired with our boots-on-the-ground approach allows us to tell a much more complete story at these sites.”
In the fall, students in Marshall’s watershed dynamics course, Geography 536, will visit project sites to collect data as well.
“Most often research projects end with more questions than they started with, so I see both of these projects as continued mechanisms to engage students in research opportunities,” she said.
Digital Archives and Virtual Field Trips
Another project emerged in the wake of Hurricane Helene—creating digital archives of historic structures to aid preservation and assess any later damage in GSMNP, the most-visited national park. Li noted that earlier lidar scans of Notre Dame Cathedral were invaluable in its reconstruction after a fire in 2019, and the park’s vulnerability was seen through not only the recent flooding but also a major fire in 2016.
In a pilot project started this spring, he and five students in Geography 424 Lidar Technology and Applications began scanning two buildings in Cades Cove, the Becky Cable House and Carter Shields Cabin.
The lidar data captures detailed measurements, and students also took photos with a 360-degree camera. Together, those can be used to create virtual field trips in the future.
“Technological innovations enable us to collect more data, ask broader spatial scale questions, and repeat measurements with time,” Marshall said. “It also allows our students to enter the workforce with a lot of tools in their toolbox. They can confidently go from asking a question, to developing a mixed methodology approach to answer that question, to collecting and processing data, and communicating those findings to a varied audience.”
By Amy Beth Miller
