Michael Curran’s reclamation monitoring research has begun to receive international attention.
Curran and a team of researchers including Sam Cox (Bureau of Land Management – Wyoming State Office), Blair Robertson (University of Canterbury – School of Mathematics and Statistics), Tim Robinson (University of Wyoming – School of Mathematics and Statistics), Calvin Strom, and Pete Stahl (University of Wyoming – Wyoming Reclamation & Restoration Center), utilized drone and handheld imagery to assess reclamation efforts on oil and gas well pads in Wyoming. They coupled a spatially balanced sampling design called Balanced Acceptance Sampling with the Traveling Salesman Problem to optimize routes across a given site. They reduced time in the field 10 fold (handheld imagery) and >25-fold (drone imagery) compared to traditional techniques.
A link to an article published by University of Wyoming can be found here: https://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2020/05/uw-students-well-pad-reclamation-research-draws-international-attention.html
