Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID IL_2024_Li

Enhancing Field-scale Drainage Mapping through Geospatial Artificial Intelligence

Institute: Illinois
Year Established: 2024 Start Date: 2024-09-01 End Date: 2025-08-31
Total Federal Funds: $15,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $15,726

Principal Investigators: Ruopu Li

Project Summary: LiDAR technology creates high-resolution land maps, essential for accurate water flow maps in agriculture. However, it often overlooks human-made barriers like roads that disrupt water flow, not captured in standard datasets like the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD). This project aims to develop a new AI system to better map water flow in farmlands by identifying these barriers. We propose to use advanced neural network models to detect drainage disruptions and will test this in a Southern Illinois watershed. Compared with the traditional manual approach, the proposed method offers better accuracy and faster computation speed. The goal is to create a more accurate field-scale water flow map, improving upon current NHD-based maps.