An Evaluation of Automated GIS Tools for Delineating Karst Sinkholes and Closed Depressions from 1-Meter LiDAR-Derived Digital Elevation Data

Abstract

delineation of sinks and depressions.In regions where the DEM had been properly conditioned, the tools for automated delineation performed reasonably well as compared to the manually delineated depressions, but generally overestimated the number of depressions thus necessitating manual filtering of the final results.Results from the TPI thresholding analysis were not dependent on DEM pre-conditioning, but the ability to extract meaningful depressions depended on careful assessment of analysis scale and TPI thresholding.