In Europe, many river beds have been very strongly modified over the industrial revolution to act as drainage without real long term thoughts. Some of these rivers are now being “renaturalized” to improve their flood control and other environment services. This is achived by re-creating meanders or removing dams, but there is a lack of tools to monitor the effect of these changes on the river bed, shores and vegetation over time. The objective of the project will be to build tools to monitor, document and quantify the evolution of small rivers after large strutural work (dam removal, re-creation of meanders): we will record reference state using a street-view-like recording back-pack (laser, cameras, IMU, GPS) and then do regular surveys to build a 4D spatio-temporal model of these environments over 12 months or more. The challenges will be to obtain a precise 3D mapping of a natural/vegetal environment with very complex 3D structure and lighting conditions, as well as the temporal alignment of these dynamic environments to observe and monitor changes over time. Ultimately, we expect to be able to “fly” through the model in space and time using VR equipment.

This project is supported by the French region “Grand Est”, the Water Agency for the Rhine and Meuse Watershed and the Zone Atelier Moselle.

Some pictures of the data collection backpack can be found below: