Nch'kay Subalpine Research
Garibaldi GIS
Connecting plant community and ITEX research with geospatial technology.
Photo of Sphinx Glacial Bay research site
Drone
Survey
The Drone Survey research project was created to collect and develop different forms of geospatial data for the Garibaldi Alpine region. The aerial survey will be conducted in the Sphinx and Sentinel glacial bays near Garibaldi Lake to collect imagery which will be used to create a Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and a Pixel Classification of different plant communities in the study area. To assess the accuracy of the pixel classification, we will conduct a ground-truthing survey by identifying the plant species within the study area. By doing this we hope to better understand the nature of which plant communities colonize both glacial bays, and have spatial data which will be foundational in continued research of this sensitive ecosystem.
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Photo of Sentinel Glacial Bay
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Unsupervised
Pixel Classification
Canoeing across our unsupervised pixel classification.
Prior to plant sampling, we created an unsupervised pixel classification of the study areas to understand the spatial distribution of the plant communities present in both glacial bays. This gave us insight into the differences in plant community composition between Sentinel and Sphinx bays, as well as their distributions across the landscape. We created this pixel classification using Planet Data PSScene imagery products to understand the community composition prior to the drone flight and planning of the supervised pixel classification. This classification has been crucial to the project as it determined the capabilities of multispectral imagery in its ability to identify plant communities and other surface types with the given spectral and spatial resolutions of the imagery.
