NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/440846
26 NEBRASKAland • JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2015 Nebraska Game and Parks biologist Lauren Dinan and field technician Lindsay Green monitor a nesting colony of least terns and piping plovers at a Western Sand and Gravel Company location near Ashland, Nebraska, near the Platte River. O n a frigid late winter day in 2011 along the Platte River at Audubon's Rowe Sanctuary, a single switch was flipped to "on" inside a waterproof camera housing, and the Platte Basin Timelapse (PBT) project officially began. The idea, to place a small army of digital 35mm cameras throughout the Platte Basin which stretches roughly 900 river miles from mountains to plains in parts of three states, would try to tell the journey of where our water comes from and document this watershed in motion for several years. Now, nearly four years later and, with a tremendous network of support, the project continues to chronicle the river in photographs, and has captured and archived almost one million images. There have been some failures and successes. It hasn't been easy, and we are far from being done. The cameras have captured amazing single images all by themselves: beautiful sunsets and lightning strikes, winter storms and torrential rainfall, herds of cattle and blizzards of geese. They have captured sequences of both natural and human engineered processes unfolding on the land over months and years at a time: floods and historic drought, sandbar movements and eroding banks, crop rotations of irrigated corn and soybeans, massive roosts of migrating cranes, and no doubt many other moments we have yet to discover, or have the eyes or knowledge to see. Over its course, the project has solved large technical issues, built a wireframe behind the scenes to direct, store and manage the images which also serve as visual data, and has collaborated with the Raikes School of Computer Science at the University of Nebraska to create a software program that helps search and sort the massive collection of images. If the first three years were dedicated to placing cameras, building partnerships, and refining technologies, the next years are focused on building content around these cameras to add context and answer what we call the "so what?" What can we do with these images to help forward appreciation