Matthew King and Robert Luckman in 2017
Randy Monica Jr., Dr. Rogers, and Nolan Rishe present their research at the Northeast ArcGIS users conference in October, 2018.
READ ABOUT OUR RESEARCH Published in the Adirondack Journal of Environmental Studies HERE. |
Purple Loosestrife (Lyrthum salicaria) is an invasive species that has infested much of the North Country and the St. Lawrence River valley.
Summer 2017 was our first, and very successful, field season, collecting data throughout St. Lawrence County looking at purple loosestrife, and other invasive species along road sides. We collected over 1,000 data points looking at homeowners lawns, public areas, agricultural roadsides, and parking areas. Our route covered State Route 56 from the blue line in South Colton, to Colton, along Rt. 68 to Canton, on to Ogdensburg, then Route 37 to Morristown and Waddington. From Morristown along Route 12 to Alexandria Bay. The total route was nearly 88 miles (with both sides of the road, that's trekking nearly 176 miles) in 4 weeks in July and August 2017. Two interns, Matthew King and Robert Luckman, helped Dr. Rogers collect data using the ESRI Collector App on cell phones, which uploaded data to the cloud and ArcGIS online for Mapping. Another successful field season was completed in 2018. Randy Monica Jr. and Nolan Rishe completed another set of monitoring the whole area. Another 700 sites were found, only about 340 were duplicates from the previous year. More research will be needed to continue to understand what's happening with the spread. All of this research was funded by a grant from the St. Lawrence River Research and Education Fund from the New York Power Authority. Beginning in Spring 2019, funded by the St. Lawrence Eastern Lake Ontario Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management (SLELO PRISM), Dr. Rogers worked with Nolan again, along with Owen Maskell and Samantha Marill. In addition to a third year of mapping the 88 miles, we began propogating beetles at the WISER Center at SUNY Potsdam and released them at high infestation sites. |
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Mapping invsaive plants with drones is the next step to understand the spread and extent of invasive plant invasions, partiularly in areas where it's difficult to walk, like wetlands. Dr. Rogers is an FAA-certified drone pilot and has begun collecting data at the Wilson Hill Wildlife Management Area as well as the Upper and Lower Lakes Wildlife Management Area. We're still figuring out the most effective ways to map these larger areas and upgrading our computer technology to accommodate such immense amounts of data. But you can see how great the images are from the image on the left. The resolution of these images is less than 1cm. We fly DJI Phantom 4Pro quadcopters as seen below.
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