Topography Changes of the University of Washington Bothell Campus

Safaa Darwish-Elhaji & Mingyou Yang, Bothell Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences – Environmental Science

The City of Bothell provided historical topographical data of the University of Washington Bothell (UWB) campus for this group to analyze the changing landscape and elevation of the area. This poster analyzes topographical vector data of the UWB campus for the years 2000, 2008, and 2015. The data were collected by the City of Bothell using Orthoimagery and LiDAR data. Goals for this project included: 1) derive digital elevation models that most accurately represent the UWB campus topography using the Topo-to-Raster technique in an ArcMap environment and 2) compare changes in elevation over time. The intent is to account for the errors that may arise when interpolating three datasets that were collected using two different remote sensing techniques. A map algebra framework is used to compare changes in topography between 2000 and 2015. The campus has had several buildings and a new parking lot added in the time these data were collected, and this group expects to see the most changes in topography where there has been construction. Since the main UWB campus sits on a steep incline, this group expects to see erosion and the effects of compensating for this erosion, as having the most impact in shifting contour lines. Future work on this topic will include comparing vegetation coverage over the years and investigate how they relate to topographic and hydrological changes.