Nearmap
The Great Salt Lake is shrinking, and that’s a problem for everyone in Utah — its waters and wetlands support millions of migratory birds, its brine shrimp feed a global aquaculture industry, and its exposed lakebed can kick up dust that sweeps into nearby population centers. As water levels change, understanding exactly what’s happening beneath the surface has never mattered more.
This session tells the story of an ambitious effort to map that hidden world. The Utah Geological Survey, Aero-Graphics, and Dewberry are collaborating on a large-scale bathymetric lidar project to map shallow lakebed, wetlands, and deeper-water environments across portions of the Great Salt Lake. The work combines Utah-based aerial acquisition, green-wavelength bathymetric lidar, multi-sensor planning, and advanced processing to improve on legacy datasets and reveal details of the lakebed that have long been difficult to see. It’s a technically demanding inland bathymetric lidar effort, complicated by murky water, shifting shorelines, and a lake that’s constantly changing shape.
The session will begin with why the lake’s decline matters: who is impacted, what’s at risk, and why better lakebed information is essential for science, management, and public decision-making. It will then move into the geospatial challenge of collecting data in a dynamic lake environment. Finally, Utah Geological Survey will share what the new data is revealing about microbialite reef structures, lakebed morphology, wetlands, geologic features, and future research needs. As Geo Week comes to Salt Lake City, this session invites attendees to look beneath the surface of one of the West’s most iconic — and most threatened — lakes and see how better data can help communities respond.
(USGS EROS imagery comparing the Great Salt Lake in 1987 and 2022)
