The Upper Tuolumne River Ecosystem Program: Capturing pre- and post-burn imagery in "gigapixels"

Friday, September 27, 2013

Capturing pre- and post-burn imagery in "gigapixels"

UC Davis has done it again, this time with "gigapixel" imagery of the Clavey River confluence, before and after the Rim Fire. A gigapixel image contains more than 100 times the information captured by a typical 10 megapixel digital camera. Gigapixel imagery is a product of NASA, Google, and Carnegie Mellon University efforts to develop imaging technologies for NASA Mars rovers. The technique has been used in Yosemite Valley to document rockfall hazards, and as UC Davis has illustrated, gigapixel imagery has potential for broad application in watershed and river management to document changing landscapes over time.

About the Program

The Tuolumne River is located on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada in central California. With headwaters in Yosemite National Park, the Tuolumne flows westward 150 miles to its confluence with the San Joaquin River in California's Central Valley.

The Upper Tuolumne River Ecosystem Program (UTREP) is a collaborative, long-term, science-based river management program led by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC).

The UTREP monitors river ecosystem conditions and develops recommendations for river management downstream of Hetch Hetchy Project facilities to support broad river ecosystem values, while maintaining water supply reliability for 2.6 million San Francisco Bay Area customers and providing clean hydropower for San Francisco municipal facilities.

Scientific collaborators include Yosemite National Park, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Stanislaus National Forest, consultants, researchers, and academics.

STATUS: UTREP efforts are currently focused on technical review and revision of the O'Shaughnessy Dam Instream Flow Management Plan and routine annual monitoring.