Increasing Stream Restoration Efficiency with 360° Digital Twins and Emerging AI Tools
Courtney Gallagher, CEO
EarthViews
Wimberley, TX
Repeated site visits, multidisciplinary coordination, and ongoing monitoring. These logistical demands can slow decision-making, increase costs, and limit stakeholder participation.
Creating immersive 360° Digital Twins—similar to Google Street View for rivers—offers a practical way to increase project efficiency. These cloud-based virtual tours allow engineers, ecologists, regulators, and community stakeholders to remotely explore restoration sites in high visual detail. Teams can revisit locations as often as needed, conduct virtual site reviews, and collaborate without repeated field mobilizations.
This approach improves efficiency across multiple stages of a project:
Pre-restoration assessment: Shared visual understanding of site conditions
Design coordination: Remote interdisciplinary review
Construction oversight: Visual documentation of progress
Post-restoration monitoring: Long-term reference archive for comparison
By transporting stakeholders directly to specific reaches or features of interest within an immersive environment, teams can reduce travel requirements and lower costs while maintaining a strong connection to on-the-ground conditions.
In addition, emerging applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning show promise for further enhancing these Digital Twins. Early-stage development efforts suggest that AI-assisted tagging and feature recognition could help highlight areas of concern—such as bank instability or vegetation changes—allowing practitioners to navigate more efficiently to priority locations within large datasets.
This presentation will explore how immersive virtual mapping is already improving workflow efficiency in restoration projects, while also outlining how developing AI tools can further streamline site evaluation and adaptive management.
About Courtney Gallagher
Courtney is a former Naval Aviator and F/A-18 Hornet pilot with a drive to serve and leave the world a better place. She holds a B.S. in Business from Cornell University and an M.S. in Technology Commercialization (MSTC) from the University of Texas, McCombs School of Business. She and her partners founded EarthViews, Inc. to bring 360 degree virtual tours to waterway managers and restoration managers, making analysis, outreach, and collaboration more efficient. EarthViews' maps, combined with GIS data provide a pre-painted canvas upon which advocates and engineers can tell their story and bring a voice to the river. Courtney enjoys cycling, hiking, and kayaking with her husband and 4 kids in Wimberley, Texas.