Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Great Plains Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The USGS Water Mission Area (WMA) Next Generation Water Observing System (NGWOS) is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research and development in the field of camera-based water monitoring technology. The application of camera-based monitoring methods that integrate image analysis and artificial intelligence techniques is of interest to NGWOS. A fundamental component to developing machine learning models to transform still camera images into water data, such as stage and discharge, is a compilation of fully labeled training images. However, there is a lack of community resources and consistency in (1) image capture protocols, (2) metadata standards, (3) data storage and delivery, and (4) image processing and machine learning workflows used to generate training datasets. Therefore, a functional, standard image processing workflow would be beneficial to the WMA and the water monitoring community.