Originally Posted by
pyroman53
I assume you have soil data. Take a look at one or more trails...maybe the AT only...whatever sized project you want to make it. Overlay trail corridor onto highly erosive soils, or highly compactable soils, (identified by soil types in your soil survey or from local or regional soil person). Overlay this with steep slopes (which you can calculate using the DEMs based on whatever criteria you choose) and maybe also overlayed with steep trail profiles. Thus, you can identify areas where you have steep hillsides, with steep trail profiles, with highly erosive soils...which might idicate areas where trail relocations might be beneficial. Certainly these might be places to groud-verify.
You could then "test" your model by going out and sampling "x" number of randomly selected areas to see if your model is working. Take some pictures which you can then georeference in your final report. Show washed out trail, stream-like water flowing down trail, etc.
You could continue this project by then suggesting alternate routes. I'm not sure if this could be modeled or if you would just manually digitise these routes based on soil types, DEM's, and maximum desired trail slope.
Finally, based on your ground truthing and modeling, you might consider prioritizing these suggested reroutes, using whatever criteria you and your local trail people might come up with.
Your final report, besides listing proposed projects with miles of old trail, miles of new trail, perseived benefits, etc., could even take it further (using local data) and estimate costs, person-hours, etc. Report would have to include an electronic map of proposed relo's with as many pop-up georeferenced photos as you can muster just to add a little wow factor.