gulf-coast

Mississippi River cutting through road and levee approximately 2.5km downriver from LA Hwy 39 southernmost road end.
images taken April 7, 2012

(Public Domain) View map details: http://mapknitter.org/map/view/bohemia-floodgate-control-structure

Way, way down at the end of the road, the Mississippi River has broken through its barriers to flood the marshes of Bohemia. On April 7th, we hiked down the flooded road to take a peek, and took the kite with us to gain some perspective.

For the past few years, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation has tracked wetlands and the hydrodynamics at the site, which is unique along the river for having no levee to restrain the river.

I don't have experience building a probe, but i have a lot of experience using hydrolab and YSI devices in ways that are not effective. These devices cost over $1000. And so, they are cost-prohibitive for non-profits, and shape official government response monitoring practices in ways that retard effective sampling.

Preparing for the next issue of the Grassroots Mapping Forum; I managed to very roughly place our Chandeleur Islands map from May 9, 2010 on a 2008 NAIP (USGS) aerial photo of the area. Sands shift so fast in this region... yikes.

Anyways I'll get a web viewer up soon and then we'll be making decisions on how to frame this on the poster-sized Forum. If you're interested in getting involved, please email me or speak up on the mailing list.

Update:

OK: here's the two actually overlaid using their georeferencing:

There were 4 different Public Labs maps made in the same area of Barataria Bay last year. We want to measure maps for above water wetlands area and I am using QGIS http://www.qgis.org to load up our geotiff map files and trace them.

There are measurement tools in the desktop suite, but we are creating a new vector polygons that can be saved together in a geographic "shapefile" that contains the geometry, spatial information, and an associated attribute table that can be populated with more information for different further activities.

Via summitcountyvoice.com, which writes:

The lawsuit, filed last week in federal court by the Waterkeeper Alliance and several Gulf Coast Waterkeeper organizations, aims to halt the spill and to make public the facts of the company’s seven-year response and recovery operation. The lawsuit claims that the damaged operation has been leaking several hundred gallons per day into the Gulf of Mexico.