The Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center (GCMRC) has collected and curated a sizeable dataset pertaining to the Grand Canyon. Much of these data are topographic in nature, representing both land and bathymetric surveys, as well as other associated information such as photography. Many of the digital data series originate from the early 1990s and are curated at the GCMRC’s offices in Flagstaff, AZ and used for various analyses to answer key management questions surrounding the Grand Canyon.

GCMRC has collaborated with North Arrow Research to produce several tools that facilitate these analyses. Key among these tools is the GCMRC Workbench, a small, lightweight desktop application that helps organize and access the monitoring data. This workbench is essentially a database that maintains an index of various data sets collected in the Grand Canyon. It helps users quickly view what data are available and then queue and run a small number of scientific analyses. The Workbench is developed by North Arrow Research and available for free under a GNU version 2 open source license.

Currently, the main analysis that is automated within the GCMRC workbench is the calculation of sandbar areas and volumes that are exposed at different discharges within the Grand Canyon. This leverages the long time series of topographic surveys collected by GCMRC and uses open source GIS procedures to quantitfy the changing sand volumes at multiple locations in the canyon under different flow regimes, one of the key management priorities for the staff making decisions about the Canyon.

North Arrow Research is a small, innovative geospatial research company based in Vancouver, Canada. We specialize on organizing and visualizing complex geospatial data and integrating it with analytical procedures to help clients maximize the value in their data. We build topographic, geomorphic and biological habitat software models.

You can obtain the GCMRC Workbench here, or read the technical reference section about the sandbar analysis. If you are already familar with the GCMRC Workbench then you can download it by clicking the button below: