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The old school vs lidar debate on burial mound surveys
I remember back in 2012 helping out with a site survey near the Mississippi River. We did it the old way, walking transects for hours with a compass and tape, flagging every little rise and dip. It took a crew of three people about two weeks to cover maybe 40 acres. Then last spring I volunteered on a project using lidar data from a drone survey. We covered 200 acres in three days and found three potential mound features the old survey totally missed. The lidar picked up subtle changes in elevation under thick brush that you just couldn't see on the ground. But here's the thing, the lidar also flagged a bunch of false positives that looked like mounds but turned out to be just natural hummocks or old logging debris. So which method gives you more reliable data for identifying burial mounds before you break ground? Anyone else wrestle with balancing speed against accuracy on surveys like this?
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sandraflores1mo agoMost Upvoted
Old school walking surveys catch things lidar CAN'T see, like subtle soil color changes or surface artifact scatters that tell you a rise is actually cultural. I've seen lidar call a beaver dam a burial mound and a deer path a prehistoric ditch. Getting boots on the ground forces you to really look at the landscape instead of staring at a computer screen. Speed is great but not when you're digging test pits into EVERY bump the machine flagged.
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the_linda1mo ago
Tell that to the crew lidar saved 80 hours of walking last month.
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the_faith1mo ago
Sandraflores, how many hours of ground truthing did you do comparing lidar hits to actual features?
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