Equipment
Equipment used by the BERM program to assess and monitor shoreline change includes: RTK-GPS, aerial photography, and video monitoring.
The program currently uses three Ashtech RTK-GPS systems to conduct surveys of beach, marsh, and marine environments. Topographic surveys are conducted using a backpack set-up (slide 1) or ATV-mounted set-up (slide 2). Bathymetric surveys utilize the R/V Arial, an 18’ rigid-hull inflatable boat, instrumented with a survey-grade marine fathometer, motion reference unit, and RTK-GPS (slide 3).
Video cameras (Erdman Video Systems) are utilized to monitor nourishment projects and to document sediment dynamics associated with beach and bar systems.
A remotely-operated 10.2 mega pixel camera attached to a 8’ (diameter) helium balloon (Southern Balloon Works) was recently purchased to obtain aerial photographs within 100m of land surface (slide 4)
