Iceland

Today is the last day most of us are in Iceland for this trip. As I started this post, we were completing a tour of the Golden Circle after a few days in beautiful Reyjkavik. Now we are preparing for departure.

I wanted to post some of the highlights of our trip. There’s a rough order to them, but don’t take the numbering too seriously – it’s been a great experience all-around. Without further ado:

1. The volcano is truly incredible. It was not uncommon for people to spontaneously shout “Wow!” and “Oh my god!” as the lava burst up from the ground.
2. We woke up every day for a few weeks with a view of a fjord.
3. We did a glacier hike on Sólheimajökull, with two awesome guides.
4. This was a historically successful round of data collection, both on the drone side and on the biology side. We’ll write and share a lot more about this in the next few months.
5. We shared space with the group of phenomenal students from the University of Glasgow. We also collaborated with them on multiple occasions, learning a lot about different ways to study wildlife and local sites.
6. THE FOOD – you probably don’t associate Iceland with food culture (I certainly didn’t), but our meals were delicious.
7. The architecture and decorations are so distinctly Icelandic.
8. Amazing photography and video – in high quality and high quantity.
9. Walking along the boundary between the North American and European plates.
10. Guided tour from our Skalanes hosts – who incidentally are awesome people – of a stretch of eastern Iceland.

Some of my personal honorable mentions include:

• Trail running at Skalanes is breathtaking.
• Blue glacier ice is real neat.
• The National Museum of Iceland is fascinating and well-done.
• Rainbow roads in both Seyðisfjörður and Reykjavik highlight what a welcoming place this country is – also perfect reminders of Pride Month in the U.S.!
• My first-in-my-lifetime tour of a beautiful country happened alongside people I admire who teach me things every single day. What more could I ask for?

If you haven’t already, check out this interview with Charlie and Emmett, conducted by Cincinnati Public Radio.

In addition to our success this year, we’ve also set up some great new opportunities for future years. With our long-time friend and collaborator Rannveig Þórhallsdóttir, we’ve added the cemetery in Seyðisfjörður to our list of sites to survey. We believe there may be historically-significant artifacts to be found there, and our drone work lends itself well to finding out.

Finally, here’s the trip by the numbers:

• 7 Earlhamites
• 26 days
• 183 GB of initial drone images and initial assemblies
• 2 great hosts at Skalanes
• 6 outstanding co-dwellers
• 4 guides at 2 sites
• 1 perfect dog
• N angry terns
• 1 amazing experience

And that’s a wrap. Hope to see you again soon, Iceland!

Cross-posted at the Earlham Field Science blog.

Update: We have learned! And we no longer agree with this post! GCP’s remain critical for deriving elevation. The cameras are not yet ready to replace that kind of precision. Always something you didn’t realize at first glance. Post preserved for posterity and because lots of it is still perfectly valid.

We recently chose not to use ground control points (GCP’s) as part of our surveying work. This is a departure from standards and conventions in the near-Earth surveying space. However, we believe we have made a sound decision that will support equally effective and more time and cost-effective research. In this post, I’ll explain that decision.

The short version: drone imagery and open-source assembly software (e,g. OpenDroneMap) are now so good that, for our purposes, GCP’s have no marginal benefit.

We have high-quality information about our trial area from an established authority – the Cultural Heritage Agency of Iceland. Their 2007 report of finds is the basis of our trial runs here at Skalanes. Surveying these predefined areas, we’ve now flown multiple flights, gathered images, and then run three assembles with OpenDroneMap.

Here’s a simple run over the area with no GCP’s:

Here’s a run over the area with GCP’s, adding no location metadata other than the craft’s built-in GPS coordinates (you’ll note that the ground footprint is slightly different, but the roundhouse in the middle is the key feature):

We also manually geocoded the GCP’s for one run.

In the end, we observed no meaningful difference between an assembly with GCP’s and an assembly without them. Adding the images as raster layers to a QGIS project confirmed this to our satisfaction:

With GCP:

Without GCP:

In summary, ground control points just don’t help us much compared to just taking a bunch of good photos and using high quality software to assemble them. They also cost us in portability: even four GCP’s are difficult to carry, occupying significant space in airport luggage and weighing down walks in the field. For scientists interested in doing work over a large area, potentially multiple times, that inconvenience is not a trivial cost.

The ODM assemblies are outstanding by themselves. We have good technology and build on the work of a lot of brilliant people. That frees us to be more nimble than we might have been before.

It wouldn’t be a post by me if it didn’t end with a cool picture. Here’s a drone image from a cliff near the house where we’re staying:

Cross-posted at the Earlham Field Science blog.