Thousands of waterways, from major rivers like the Potomac and Susquehanna to tiny headwaters, flow through the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Many of them appear on official stream maps produced by the U.S. Geological Survey, but many others go unrecorded.

Because the official maps are incomplete, “if you base management and restoration goals on coarse stream maps, you’re going to miss a big part of the picture,” says Matthew Baker, professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).

Baker’s partnership with the non-profit Chesapeake Conservancy has been awarded $1.2 million from the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) to create a more accurate, updated map for the watershed by applying new stream mapping techniques.

The Chesapeake Bay Program is supporting accurate stream mapping to improve management and implementation of the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load—daily Bay pollution limits set by the U.S. EPA in 2010.

Small streams are often overlooked for restoration activities because they do not show up on the official maps, despite delivering large amounts of nutrient and sediment pollution to the Bay. Updated stream maps will help partners throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed prioritize restoration efforts and better understand how pollution enters the Bay’s tributaries.

Innovative approaches

This project follows a previous Chesapeake Bay Trust (CBT) award to Baker and his Chesapeake Conservancy colleagues to develop the methods necessary to carry out such a daunting task. With traditional methods, “You need skilled personnel doing very tedious, detail-oriented work over a long period of time,” says Baker. “We look forward to continuing to develop more automated, efficient and cost-effective ways.”

Now, Baker and his team get the chance to take on the challenge of using their new techniques to create the most detailed map of the region’s waterways to date, in a fraction of the time required by previous methods.

To identify previously unmapped stream channels, Baker and his team will analyze data from models of the terrain generated by light detection and ranging (LiDAR). This technology uses lasers emitted from aircraft to measure the relative height of Earth’s surface very precisely. But that’s just the beginning.

Baker’s team will remove inconsistencies and errors inherent to the LiDAR data, such as when the laser beam hits tree leaves or water surfaces instead of the ground. Then the team will find stream channels by creatively applying algorithms that interpret the terrain in the context of the surrounding landscape. The new maps may still not capture every single channel, but Baker hopes to get a lot closer while limiting false-positives.

Connecting the dots

“What the CBP was asking for was not just, ‘How do you find the channels?’, but, ‘How do you link them together in a connected network?’ And, ironically, that’s not a simple thing to do with this sort of detailed terrain information,” Baker says.

“For example, if a stream flows under a road, the road is interpreted as a kind of dam by conventional computer algorithms, even though our eyes and brain naturally connect the channel on either side,” Baker explains. Although such features are intuitive for people, computers need to be taught how to fill in those gaps accurately and appropriately.

Once the team develops a more complete map, they will still have one more crucial step to complete. “A big part of the project is to validate and check the map,” Baker says. “If the stream map isn’t reliable and no one believes it, then it’s not very useful. So that’s what we’re going to spend a lot of time doing.”

He estimates that about two-thirds of the time spent on the six-year project will focus on quality control. “With Chesapeake Conservancy’s assistance and expertise, we will compare the results of the new automated techniques with data collected from aerial imagery or on the ground at sites around the watershed.”

“Chesapeake Conservancy is a great partner in this context,” says Baker. “They’ve developed a lot of experience generating geographic datasets for the watershed.”

Conservation outcomes

Having a complete, reliable map is essential for protecting waterways. “If we want to understand how what we do on the landscape influences stream integrity and downstream health in places like the Chesapeake Bay,” Baker says, “then being able to map the connections between human activities on the land and the circulatory water system that delivers their effects to the Bay is paramount.”

Streams not visible on current official maps have already proven extremely important in research. Early evidence that vegetation alongside streams could reduce discharges of harmful pollutants into the Bay came from research on streams that weren’t on the best USGS maps at the time, Baker notes.

For now, the USGS has identified developing high-resolution stream maps as a national goal, and Baker hopes to contribute to that effort. The updated, verified map will enhance management and protection within the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and the methods Baker and the Chesapeake Conservancy have developed have the potential to improve stream mapping—and to better protect waterways—across the nation and the world.

Image: Matthew Baker at UMBC. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra seeks an Assistant to the Music Director & Artistic Coordinator.

JOB SUMMARY

Capital Gazette Article by:  

Matt Rutherford and Nicole Trenholm weren’t going to let bad news about a grant for this year’s arctic marine expedition stop them. So they hitched a ride. Friends with boats, right?  “The deal is they will take us into Greenland waters for our research in exchange for me helping them navigate the toughest sections of the Northwest Passage,” Rutherford said. He met the owners of the boat while delivering a boat from Panama to San Diego a few years back.  The couple, who make up the Ocean Research Project using the small platform of a sailboat to perform marine research delving into man’s effect on the world’s oceans, was determined to get back into the Arctic for follow up research from their 2016 mission to northern Greenland.  And they were buoyed after co-publishing a paper with NASA scientists and the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project, published by Oceanography magazine in June, based on their research into ocean temperatures affecting Greenland glacier melt.  And further boosted by the donation of a 65-foot steel-hulled Bruce Roberts sailboat to their cause. It needs some sprucing up, but should prove to be a vessel for the long haul.  They took off from their home base in Annapolis July 23, flying to Reykjavik, Iceland, then to Greenland.  The scientist half of the operation is Trenholm while Rutherford, famous for his 2012 single-handed nonstop voyage around the Americas — the first to ever accomplish the sailing feat — is the captain and spark plug.  Trenholm, who also has a blog and teaching arrangement with Anne Arundel County Public Schools STEM program, posted some details after they made it to Aasiaat, Greenland, a small village about a third of the way up the icy coast.  They boarded Toboggan, the boat they hitched a ride on, and took off up Disko Bay to record water temperatures approaching Jakobshavn Glacier, known to calf off chunks of ice the size of New York City.  “With our CTD instrument, which measures conductivity, temperature and depth, we indeed found that warm water,” Trenholm wrote.  From there they moved north to Upernavik to check ice charts and gear up to cross Baffin Bay into the Northwest Passage, a three-day sail.  By Friday night they were just off Devon Island, the largest uninhabited island on earth, at the eastern end of the passage.

They plan to conduct more research.

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The Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery is pleased to announce the implementation of ScholarWorks@UMBC, a system for collecting UMBC research and creative work outputs in one place to showcase what UMBC does. Academic departments and faculty have their own pages displaying a list of all full-text works included. Faculty sponsored student work exemplifying teaching and learning can also be included. Depositing research in ScholarWorks@UMBC extends dissemination of your work more widely than high-priced journals, making it available for free worldwide, increasing impact and potential citations. All content included in ScholarWorks@UMBC is issued a permanent URL and indexed by Google Scholar. ScholarWorks@UMBC will soon also include automated social media mentions to help promote your work. ScholarWorks@UMBC is part of the Maryland Share Open Access Repository (MDSOAR), a system shared by 13 Maryland colleges and universities.

Librarian Michelle Flinchbaugh (flinchba@umbc.edu, x56754) is available to demo the system for departments and individual faculty and assist them in getting started. The Library has made available a guide to submitting works to ScholarWorks@UMBC with information on submissions. For help with ScholarWorks@UMBC within one business day, email scholarworks-group@umbc.edu