New River Symposium

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/86759
The New River Symposium is a multidisciplinary conference held biennially in the New River watershed (parts of North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia) organized by the New River Conservancy. Photo: Shumate Falls, Va., near the West Virginia state line.

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Browsing New River Symposium by Subject "Claytor Lake"

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    Using Deep Learning to Detect Land Cover Change and Correlate with Water Quality for the New River 2011-2021
    Foy, Andrew (New River Symposium, 2024-04-12)
    The land cover composition of a watershed is a critical multivariant factor that affects the water quality of river systems. There have been numerous studies on land cover change in the New River Basin, but most use low resolution satellite imagery, are not recent, and don’t directly correlate to changes in water quality. This research investigates land cover change in the New River-Peak Creek HUC10 (0505000115), which encompasses Claytor Lake in Virginia, from 2010-2022, using high resolution orthophotography and deep learning. Advancements in artificial intelligence have led to expansive growth in the applications of deep learning for remote sensing. There are new deep learning models, which are excellent at learning and characterizing complex land cover semantics, producing high-quality land cover data. This paper reviews the observed benefits of using deep learning methods and demonstrates the applications for assessing land cover effects on water quality. The land cover change in the watershed and the riparian buffer zone of HUC10-0505000115 were statistically analyzed to detect/predict changes in water quality data. There were noticeable benefits to using deep learning to analyze land cover change, but challenges remain in correlating those multivariant changes to statistically significant differences in water quality.
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    Water and Lands Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (WALROS)
    Carroll, Joshua; Mohl, Isabelle; Taylor, Alexis (New River Symposium, 2024-04-12)
    Water recreation along the New River and Claytor Lake continue to gain popularity, and Water Access remains one of the top priorities for the Virginia Outdoors Plan, backed by significant demand and use. One tool that has been used to help managers, planners, and communities better understand the resource they are charged with protecting is the Water and Lands Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (WALROS). WALROS is an inventory, planning, and mapping tool used to categorize natural resources and recreation settings, to help focus management action and limited resources. WALROS works on the premise that a recreation activity takes place in a particular setting, and this yields an experience and associated benefits. The goal of WALROS is to inventory and classify the physical, social, and managerial setting attributes in order to better understand the resource and to concentrate natural resource management, planning, and outreach efforts. During the past several years, WALROS data have been collected on various sections of Claytor Lake and the New River. This presentation will provide an overview of WALROS, how it can be used as a planning and management tool, results of data collected thus far, and aims to spark discussions for possible future uses on Claytor Lake and/or the New River. This will include discussion-based slides as well as color-coded digital maps that depict different setting attributes and classifications that highlight how these can change across seasons, use levels, and setting attributes themselves.