UTILIZING SPHERICAL PANORAMIC PHOTOGRAPHY IN A GIS ENVIRONMENT FOR AGGREGATE RESOURCE INVENTORY AND ASSESSMENT: HURON-MANISTEE NATIONAL FORESTS, MI

The development of aggregate resources on Federal lands in the Huron-Manistee National Forest has been a decreasing priority since the 1980s. Many sand and gravel pits on Federal lands have been abandoned or reclaimed. Information about former pit locations, and the quality and quantity of remaining resources therein, has become antiquated or resides as informal knowledge in the minds of district personnel. As part of an ongoing effort to reinvigorate interest and awareness about remaining and potential aggregate resources on the Huron-Manistee National Forests, the locations of sand and gravel pits were mapped and information about them was stored in an ArcGIS geodatabase. To document on-the-ground conditions of each pit, spherical panoramic photos were captured and integrated with the geodatabase in Google Earth. In recent years, spherical panoramic photography has become increasingly popular among hobbyist and professional photographers, and more recently among scientists and natural resource managers. This photographic technique involves taking a series of photos from the same rotation point, stitching the photos together, and projecting the final image onto a sphere to create a 360x180 degree panoramic scene. These images can be shared via the internet or georeferenced and viewed in Google Earth to help facilitate communication about natural phenomena. From a natural resource management perspective, spherical panoramas can provide a realistic portrayal of resource conditions on the ground that land managers and other personnel can view simultaneously from their computer without going into the field. This presentation will demonstrate the utility of spherical panoramic photography as it pertains to inventorying sand and gravel pits on the Huron-Manistee National Forest, as well as discuss the methods, workflow, and challenges of integrating spherical panoramas into a geodatabase design.