cent shorelines, channels, and dredge disposal areas, exceeds what conventional surveys can produce cost-effectively and thus contributes to a more complete understanding of sediment movement in and around USACE navigation projects. SHOALS has helped to enable new business practices within the USACE that should lead to improved navigation channel maintenance. Strategic partnering by district planning, engineering, and operations has provided for regional, rather than individual, project approaches to sediment management. SHOALS has supported this new business initiative because of its ability to rapidly and cost-effectively conduct regional scale coastal surveys. In addition to improved partnerships with the districts, the SHOALS program has partnered with the U.S. Navy and the National Ocean Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and has conducted surveys for the U.S. Geological Survey, state governments, and several foreign countries. The program has also extended its applications to include nautical charting, shoreline mapping, coastal monitoring, coral reef mapping, and military operations.

Barriers

The initial institutional barriers to implementing SHOALS surveys in the USACE centered on issues related to acceptance of a new way of doing business. The data collectors, those using boats for hydrographic surveys, resisted because it was not their system. There were questions about survey costs and about how to compare costs of conventional versus remotely sensed hydrographic surveys. This issue was complicated by the fact that a typical conventional navigation project survey does not produce the same product as a SHOALS survey. Data users, on the other hand, were much quicker to order a SHOALS survey. However, they had problems initially because the data files were much larger than those obtained with conventional surveys, and few computer tools and models existed to allow easy utilization of the data. The usefulness of the SHOALS system is limited in areas of poor water quality and at depths over 60 meters. This led to a multiplatform approach that uses boats in areas where the lidar is not effective.