Mapping fault geomorphology with drone-based lidar
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The advent of sub-meter resolution topographic surveying has revolutionized active fault mapping. Light detection and ranging (lidar) collected using crewed airborne laser scanning (ALS) can provide ground coverage of entire fault systems but is expensive, while Structure-from-Motion (SfM) photogrammetry from uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) is popular for mapping smaller sites but cannot image beneath vegetation. Here, we present a new UAV laser scanning (ULS) system which overcomes these limitations to survey fault-related topography cost-effectively, at desirable spatial resolutions, and even beneath dense vegetation. In describing our system, data acquisition and processing workflows, we provide a practical guide for other researchers interested in developing their own ULS capabilities. We showcase ULS data collected over faults from a variety of terrain and vegetation types across the Canadian Cordillera and compare them to conventional ALS and SfM data. Due to the lower, slower UAV flights, ULS offers improved ground return density (~260 points/m2 for the capture of a paleoseismic trenching site and ~10–72 points/m2 for larger, multi-kilometer fault surveys) over conventional ALS (~3–9 points/m2) as well as better vegetation penetration than both ALS and SfM. The resulting ~20–50 cm-resolution ULS terrain models reveal fine-scale tectonic landforms that would otherwise be challenging to image.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it