In the winter of 2015, I joined an organization in Armenia interested in more exact measurements within inaccessible rooms in a monestary complex. We employed low mount LiDAR and took scans from holes in the ceiling as well as from a small nook the Eastern wall. The results can be seen above.

Our vision was to provide community supported, hightech, monitoring of the restoration of the San Dieguito River Park Marsh (hereafter San Dieguito Marsh), a natural recreation and wildlife observation park in the great San Diego, California area. Land managers often lack vital long term, large scale data sets that allow them to make informed decisions. We utilized drone imagery through aerial photogrammetry to create high resolution maps, models, and conservation materials for the marsh, while establishing citizen science infrastructure to sustain a continuous data collection effort. As far as we are aware, this will be one of the first times such a project was accomplished for biological monitoring and land management with an outlook of understanding climate change effects, such as sea level rise, will impact the marsh plant community and topography structure, allowing managers to make informed mitigation efforts. In doing so, we hoped to encourage other land managers along the california coast to adopt our community based, high tech approach to environmental sustainability.

As part of a National Geographic Young Explorer Grant I worked with marine geologist/archaeologist Beverly Goodman to identify and document key features for understanding tsunami magnitude from the second and third century. I used underwater LiDAR provided by 2GRobotics to get an accurate measurement of the holes left by the original tsunami.

I partnered on a project with UPenn to ascertain the weight of a sphinx located in Abydos, a necropolis north of Luxor. For this I created a 3D mesh from terrestrial LiDAR data, providing me with an accurate volume. Comparing the volume with the average kilogram of a square meter of the sediment type we were able to weigh the sphinx at a whopping 12.6 tons!

In Masjid Wazir Khans 400 year history, the surrounding area has had innumerable changes. One of the more discrete changes also happens to be having one of the largest effects. Since it's construction in 1641, the surrounding roadway has risen over 2 meters from it's original level. Scanning one of the excavated sections allows us to extrapolate how the original mosque would have looked and gives new insight into current water runoff and damage issues.  

In the fall of 2016 a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar and damaged over 400 of the nearly 3000 temples of the Bagan Valley. Comparing against previously collected 3D data, I was able to quantify the damage to individual temples and guide local emergency conservation teams. During the two weeks on the ground, I documented over fifteen sites and created a baseline for future conservators to work from.

In many of the top museums in the world reproductions are still created with plaster molds. These molds can damage and errode the releifs they are meant to be preserving. In 2015 we worked with the British Museum to change the way in which mold were created, utilizing non-invasive structured light scanning.

In 2016 I began testing methods for sharing the large archive of sites CyArk has collected over the 12 years of its existence. With the recent developments in virtual reality technology we were able to produce 3D environments for a world audience to enjoy. On a project in Bagan, Myanmanr we were even able to show some of the local young monks our data!

In the December of 2017 I embarked on a mission with Factum Foundation to document supposed dinosaur footprints in Baluchistan, a western boarder state of Pakistan. Heavy conflict in the region prohibited experts from visiting and analyzing the prints. Well if you can’t bring the experts to the mountain, bring the mountain to them! I documented the site over two days during with time we were able to capture photogrammetry data with a resolution of 200 microns. At this resolution the targeted region could be reproduced and analyzed in Madrid, nearly 5000 miles away. Construction from the Chinese belt and road initiative have now demolished the original site and the 3D models are all that remains of what could be evidence of the second largest terrestrial dinosaur ever recorded.