Internet Mapping Services Facilitate Distribution and Analysis of Sediment Movement and Storage Changes of the Colorado River in Grand Canyon

Tracking changes in sediment storage and evolution of bed material grain size is a daunting task on large rivers. Remotely-sensed data, including aerial photography, provides one means of quantifying the distribution of bars, dimensions of the channel, characteristics of the floodplain, and other aspects of riverine ecosystem habitat. Yet the collection and analysis of spatially-extensive data does not ensure rigorous interpretation of those data because of the difficulty of making those data available to the larger scientific community. In order to meet the need of making the spatially extensive databases for the Colorado River in Grand Canyon available to the broad scientific community, we have developed two online GIS services. The FISTnet service highlights a host of geospatial data sets collected for defined reaches along the Colorado River. Data portrayed in this service include digital 4-band aerial imagery and derived classifications, topography collected from LiDAR and traditional survey methods, Multi-beam Sonar bathymetry, video and still photography of river bed characteristics, and associated tabular information. The Colorado River Geomorphic Habitat Mapper service provides users with a suite of broad geomorphic thematic layers for the entire river corridor, including texture classifications, vegetation, sand, cliff, debris fans and cobble bars.