Engineering Commons^™

Estimation Of Two-Stage Ditch Excavation Volume Using Lidar Data Full Paper, Kirsten E. Paff, Jane Frankenberger, Naime Celik

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Drainage ditches are a major pathway for sediment, nutrients, and pesticides to enter stream systems, which threaten environmental and human health. Unlike trapezoidal ditches, two-stage ditches have a vegetated bench that acts as a floodplain, which helps to prevent erosion and to increase the processing of nutrients to improve water quality. Converting a trapezoidal ditch to a two-stage ditch is expensive, due to the large volumes of soil that need to be excavated. Since ditch geometries vary significantly and surveying each potential site by hand would be time consuming and expensive, a tool based upon online Light Detection and Ranging …