Infrared Aerials

[Brian Beauchamp]

...just curious as to what sources anyone else uses for various inventory/mapping/sale projects. Any info would be very much appreciated! 

[SwampDonkey]

Digitized, distortion free, aerial orthophotos supplied free of charge from the government.  ;)

[Brian Beauchamp]

DanG Canadians! Anyone else...preferably in the lower 48 of the U.S.A.?

[SwampDonkey]

Brian, are you searching for some, or? If you have an ESRI product, try googling

"ArcIMS map server Oklahoma"

I found this server: http://www.seic.okstate.edu

[Rocky_Ranger]

State government here in Arkansas has down to 2 meter resolution (Sebastian County) ESRI products, most others is 4 and 5 meter.  I believe all our counties participate - download the county files overnight (they are huge) and open with Arcmap.  The two meter stuff you can see a hardhat in the woods if the canopy allows it.  And talk about finding junk piles............

[Brian Beauchamp]

Thanks, Swamp Donkey and Rocky Ranger. Haven't gotten a response from the OSU people, SD...I'm sure it'll pan out eventually though with some info.

That's very helpful info, RR...wish OK had that as well. Those should come in handy when I have jobs over in AR. I guess I could pay to have the properties flown, but if there's a free source, that's all I need...just a way to locate them before cruising. Thanks again, guys.

Anyone know of any 'subscription' sites that allows access to them or has them individually available for purchase? I've ran across a couple, but they are spotty with what they have available and they tend to be very out of date...some of them full rotation age or longer.

[BrandonTN]

Digitized, distortion free, aerial orthophotos supplied free of charge from the government.

SwampDonkey, are those in black & white?  I heard here in the US all government satellites take pictures in black and white only. ....are aerials those you speak of from satellites?

[semologger]

Ive been looking at pine stands on Google Maps and MSN Live Maps. Ark has better quality aerials than Mo. The pine stands stick out nice and green. I dont know if its the time of year they took the photo. 

[SwampDonkey]

BrandonTN, aerial photos taken with digital cameras mounted on airplanes. They fly at 12500 meters ASL. They are very accurate from what I find when loading them into the GPS and traversing blocks. They are full color photos. Anyone can retrieve them. They are in the NAD83 N.B. Double Stereographic map datum. Trimble's GPS's and ESRI's Arcpad handle that datum.


Here's the link to the GIS maps and aerials for a look. Photoshop can open them with the MrSID plugin or a GIS that supports MrSID. The photos are MrSID format and about 2.5 meg each. They are actually a mosaic of photos to fit our land registration maps with property lines, that property line layer is also on this link.

Softcopy Orthophotomap Data Base (Distortion-free aerial photos)

[VT_Forestry]

Here in Virginia we can get CIR aerial photos of just about everywhere from either the University of Virginia or right here at Virginia Tech.  I've had good luck searching google for "state GIS data", just replace state with whatever place you're looking for...seems to always find something.  Colleges are the best places to check and usually maintain some sort of database, it looks like that first site from OSU that was posted was the best for aerials of Oklahoma.  You can get county wide aerials, which will take forever to download but contain a LOT of information.   

[SwampDonkey]

Kentucky, Florida, Michigan, and South Dakota seem to have good data that you can either download or use a map server on a fast connection to access. Here is New Brunswick Forestry companies, DNR and Agriculture fly the photos, well they contract the work. It's usually done, I think, by an outfit down in Nova Scotia. I have no idea why NB wouldn't just fly their own. Then the NB government tenders the photo interp. ,mosaic work, and forest development surveys and ground truthing of sample stands from the photos. Takes about 3 years I think to get the whole package from flight to GIS data. It's a lot of very expensive work. On freehold the forest companies do their own. I remember some of the maps 20 years ago they were producing, there were some very poor maps. Cut blocks and forest boundaries sometimes were off by quite a lot. They were kind of done on the fly and the distortion was terrible at times, that's why stuff often didn't match up. Has come a long way since then because of GPS.