2026 Big Sky GeoCon - From Data to Design

A large rainfall event triggered multiple landslides across Bridger Bowl Ski Area in southwest Montana on July 29, 2025. The Geospatial Core Facility at Montana State University conducted a UAV-based LiDAR survey over a landslide path along the northern boundary of Bridger Bowl and generated a 1-m resolution post-event digital elevation model (DEM). A pre-event 1-m DEM was obtained from the U.S. Geological Survey. Raster differencing between the pre- and post-event DEMs was used to estimate a volumetric displacement of 16,000 m3. These results demonstrate the value of UAV LiDAR for post-event landslide assessment and terrain management in alpine environments.

Extreme heat and rapid urbanization are converging challenges for the Arabian Peninsula, yet their fine-grained interactions remain poorly understood. We present a high-resolution assessment of land-cover land-use change, population growth, and land surface temperature (LST) from 2000 to 2020. We found that newly urbanized areas converted from desert exhibited significantly lower warming (+1.78°C) than existing urban areas (+2.39°C) and unchanged desert (+2.97°C). However, these newly urbanized areas maintained higher mean LST than existing urban areas by 2020 (42.68°C versus 41.29°C), creating a counter intuitive thermal where 13.1 million new residents live in places that experienced relative cooling yet higher absolute LST exposure. We furthermore identified distinct population-thermal pathways: small Gulf states achieved population growth with minimal warming through densification, while larger countries showed sprawl-dominated patterns with varied thermal outcomes. Our findings demonstrate that desert cities experience fundamentally different thermal dynamics than temperate regions and require a revised adaptation framework accounting for urban cooling potential and extreme baseline temperatures.

Many of the major themes within Environmental Education rely upon remote sensing and orbital data collection. This unit was developed to introduce students in grades 11-12 to the science behind the maps and graphics they see in class. It ranges from a review of the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum to data manipulation, ground-truthing, and ArcGIS workflows.
The unit begins with a physical modeling of active vs. passive sensing and spectral signatures, teaching students to recognize that every land cover—from healthy forest to impervious urban surfaces—possesses a unique "spectral fingerprint." Students use resources from NASA and the USGS to develop an understanding of how global change can be detected remotely.
As the unit progresses, students access primary data via USGS EarthExplorer, perform change-detection analysis of their local area using Landsat time-series data, and calculate the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) to model ecological disturbance. An infrared sensor and an air quality sensor are used to collect data around the school campus. This field data is crowdsourced via ArcGIS Survey123 and visualized alongside satellite imagery in ArcGIS Living Atlas in an attempt to demonstrate "ground-truthing." The unit culminates in an ArcGIS workflow that helps students build a comprehensive ArcGIS StoryMap portfolio detailing their learning progress throughout the unit.