Embedded Files
Bathymetric Survey of Church Pond
Field Surveying:
Although Church Pond is commonly understood as a single pond, few realize it is actually split into distinct East and West sections. Our team set out to better understand Church Pond, its shape, its history, and how its eastern and western basins became connected. Local stories claim that Paul Smith, the hotel owner in the early 1900s, built canals so guests could paddle to a small chapel near the pond. But when we looked deeper, the story didn’t quite add up. Around the same time, Smith was involved in redirecting water for hydropower elsewhere in the region, and some of his work near Osgood Pond and Church Pond may have been part of similar efforts. The story of the flooding of the old military road and the shallow shelf connecting the supposed two halves of Church Pond supports the idea that these canal projects left a lasting mark on the landscape.
To explore the modern pond itself, we completed a bathymetric survey and created digital models of the lakebed using three mapping methods: IDW, which estimates depth based on nearby points; Empirical Bayesian Kriging, which uses statistical relationships in the data to create smoother surfaces; and Topo to Raster, which builds terrain models suited for natural drainage patterns. Comparing these helped us understand which approach best captures Church Pond’s underwater shape.
All of this work, historical research, field data, and lakebed models, comes together in the StoryMap below.
ChurchPondBathymetricSurvey.pdfPrevious Projects
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