Seminar: Kalinda Roberts & 3D Beach Profiling

The Lab’s May seminar presentation features UMass Boston School for the Environment master’s student Kalinda Roberts, and her work on a novel beach monitoring technique!

Her research, funded by the Stone Living Lab, focuses on the use of “3D beach profiles”, a new beach monitoring technique. By incorporating Structure-from-Motion (SfM) technology and machine learning into beach profiling methods, 3D beach profiling enables detailed measurement of spatial and temporal changes in the morphology and grain-size of beaches.

Kalinda has conducted quarterly surveys of three beaches in Greater Boston and the Cape region using a pole-mounted camera to capture photos of beach surfaces. These photos are then processed using SfM software to develop high-resolution orthoimagery and digital surface models for spatial analyses of coastal processes.

Using these data products and machine learning algorithms, she is able to estimate grain size distributions of surface sediments along the beach profile. This innovative technique as a monitoring method has the potential to provide valuable scientific insights for the management of these beaches, and the potential implementation of nature-based approaches to mitigating sea level rise, such as cobble berms.