Aerial Photo Inventory, Acquisition and Orthorectification Project for Little Bighorn NB and Grant-Kohrs NHS

Gustafson, Willard; Frakes, Brent

In 2006 the Rocky Mountain Network I&M program entered into a cooperative agreement with the Wildlife Spatial Analysis Lab, University of Montana, to acquire and orthorectify historical areal photography. Baseline aerial photography in a digital and orthorectified format serves as an important foundation for addressing baseline conditions in all ROMN parks. At GRKO, knowing how the landscape has changed over the last century provides valuable insight into the cultural-natural landscape. At LIBI, this information will serve to help understand vegetation and fire dynamics, changes in the cultural and physical landscape, and will integrate closely with the vegetation map planned for the park. For all parks, historic photography is rich in information beyond VS monitoring and can be used by all park divisions, including interpretation and maintenance. Objectives for the project included:• Develop and inventory of historic aerial photography for GRKO and LIBI;• Settle on (1) Number of time series (2) desired photo dates, (3) footprint, (4) imagery type (color or B/W) and scale of imagery that meets goals of the VS monitoring and is within budget.• Acquire imagery – Focus will be on acquiring the most recent imagery first. Older imagery, particularly prior to the 1960s, is time-consuming because work must be coordinated with the National Archives.• Orthorectify - Using the most recent 1-m DOQQs (NAIP 2005 imagery) as a reference, orthorectify imagery with a RMSE of no more than +- 14 meters (+/-7 DOQQ error from reality +/- 7m) new image error from DOQQ)• Mosaic – Imagery should be contrast balanced so that seams are invisible and linear feature match up.• Document – Metadata for the source imagery and orthorectification process will be provided in FGDC-compliant xml format.