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Mission Statement
The Mission of the Lower Brule Environmental Protection Office (EPO) is to protect the public health by building the capacity of our office, promoting environmental education/outreach, development and approval of environmental codes/ordinances, providing environmental monitoring, providing technical assistance and cooperating with other environmental agencies on funding and projects.
The Environmental Protection Office’s Water Quality Program, in cooperation with the USGS and Oglala Lakota College, began monitoring shoreline erosion along the Missouri River in 2011. Shoreline erosion has been a problem to the Lower Brule community ever since the construction of the Big Bend dam.
The erosion is threatening cultural sites, causing problems with the community's drinking water, causing a loss of reservation acres, threatening irrigation pivots, and adding a large amount of sediment into the Missouri River (Lake Sharpe and Lake Francis Case). The above video is an example of one of the three technologies that we are using to collect data, an unmanned aerial system (UAS), the “Raven”.
The “Raven” is being used to capture video and still pictures in an effort to monitor the changes in bank erosion along a seven-mile stretch of shoreline.
Other technologies being used include ground-based Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), and Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) satellite navigation system.
Environmental Resources and Links