The logistics, costs, and capacity to complete cultural resources (CR) surveys to satisfy the Department of Defense's (DoD) statutory obligation to manage these resources present challenges to DoD land managers. The increasing availability of high-resolution airborne laser scanning (ALS) datasets, referred to as aerial light detection and ranging (LiDAR), is revolutionizing data collection and analysis across multiple fields, including cultural resource management. This project applies ALS and terrestrial laser scanning technologies, data processing, and analyses to develop a toolkit that will make LiDAR data and analytic products accessible and available to DoD cultural resource managers.

This LiDAR toolkit for cultural resources will be deployed in two focal areas: 1) detecting and describing archaeological features within ground-filtered LiDAR products using machine learning (ML) approaches and 2) assessing wildfire and prescribed fire hazards to cultural resources by connecting LiDAR-inventoried fuels to potential direct and indirect adverse effects from wildfire and prescribed fire. This toolkit will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of current cultural resource survey methods, advance methods of archaeological site investigation and detection, allow for rapid post-disturbance triage of sensitive sites and resources, and mitigate impacts of a changing landscape (i.e., wildfire regimes) on heritage landscapes and cultural resources within DoD properties. The successful completion of this project will include meeting performance criteria for the ML feature detection results (including balanced accuracy, precision, and recall), total coverage of archaeological sites and features within the demonstration site (>90%), and ease of integration within existing DoD CR management workflows.

The project toolkit will benefit DoD CRM programs in the following ways: 1) increasing the speed and efficiency of new archaeological sites detection and monitoring of existing resources over large spatial scales; 2) rapidly identifying fuelbeds that can potentially cause adverse effects to archaeological sites during wildfires and prescribed fires so that fuel treatments or other intervention strategies can be prioritized in pre-fire planning; 3) providing DoD CRM staff with a LiDAR toolkit that can be integrated into existing planned resource management, long-term site monitoring, and archaeological survey/CRM contracting. The LiDAR toolkit will be flexible enough to be deployed to any DoD installation with a CRM program, known archeological sites for model development (training/testing), and existing ALS datasets. This demonstration will facilitate tailoring of LiDAR data products, model outputs, and data collection methods to fit existing DoD CRM tools and procedures, thus allowing an effective transition to other DoD sites.