Flower Garden Banks (Jun 2019)

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Project overview:

The Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary has an extensive program in place to monitor the conditions of these spectacular natural environments. Two 100 x 100 m study sites were established over 3 decades ago and form the cornerstone of their ongoing monitoring efforts. Our goal in this project was to collect underwater landscape mosaics of these sites to provide a new perspective on monitoring efforts and also to further outreach efforts by providing s visual connection to these remote sites that are hard to visit in person. In Jun 2019 we had 2 days on site and were able to collect data for the East Bank site. Preview images of these data as they are being procesed are posted below. A link to a fact sheet with more details is also provided.

Preview images:

Note: Right click and "save as" for the png images. They are huge! The Zoomify and Potree are 2-D and 3-D online viewers, respectively.

• Northeast quadrant zoomify | potree | png (1mm/pix) | png (2.5mm/pix).
• Southeast quadrant zoomify | potree | png (2.5mm/pix).
• Northwest quadrant zoomify | potree | png (3.5mm/pix).
• Southwest quadrant zoomify | potree | png (3.5mm/pix).
• Fused, full 100 x 100 m monitoring site (draft) zoomify | potree.
  As of Mar 2020 this is the biggest mosaic in terms of pixels/points that I have made. The orthomosaic is 14.5 gigapixels and the point cloud has over 4 billion points! Zomify is reasonably fast to show the orthomosaic, but potree will be slow unless your network connection is very fast - be patient. If your network connection and graphics card are fast enough, try playing with the "point budget" slider in potree to increase sharpness when zoomed in. I find a low number (1-2 million) is good for spinning the 3D model and zooming in and out, but that a higher number makes the model look better when zoomed in. Play with it and see what works for you.

Fact Sheet:

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