Lidar and Remote Sensing Services
Lidar and remote sensing are making traditional photogrammetry and mapping methodologies obsolete. A crucial part of any environmental documentation or permit application is collecting and mapping significant amounts of data regarding the natural and built environment. Traditional surveying and aerial mapping methodologies are expensive and time-consuming, and the resulting maps may miss crucial features and details.
ECORP provides Lidar and Remote Sensing Services to ensure that all available data is collected from a project site, even if it is hidden beneath vegetation or underneath the ground. This allows us to better determine what environmental regulations apply at a given project site and what environmental consulting services are required to ensure that those regulations are followed.
How Does Lidar Compare to Traditional Mapping Alternatives?
Today, for a fraction of the cost of traditional services, lidar, and remote sensing services can map your site’s topography in unprecedented detail and in far shorter time frames.
An aircraft-mounted lidar system collects thousands of times more data than alternative methodologies. It captures things that are inefficient with a survey crew and are impossible to do by photogrammetry. A lidar sensor operating at 150khz can collect up to 20-30 points per square meter and up to a million points in under ten seconds. Matching this exceptional data set using traditional methods would take months or years by comparison.
The lidar system creates a “point cloud” from the millions of data points collected. Analysis of the point cloud produces exceptionally detailed and dense data sets describing topographic features and vegetation height data with high accuracy and high precision. The following photographs compare a lidar-based map to one made by photogrammetry.
What Are the Advantages of Lidar?
Lidar’s advantages over its alternatives:
- Precision
- Accuracy
- Exceptional data sets
- Robust software to parse and analyze data
- Highly versatile mapping data displays from bare ground to exact locations of trees, structures, and other ground features.
- Cost-effective for medium and large projects
Lidar Services
Unlike our unmanned aerial system (UAS) services, where we own and pilot our own drones, ECORP works with best-in-class lidar providers to fly aircraft over your project site and provide the raw data to us for analysis and mapping.
ECORP can potentially help decrease your costs by combining data collection orders. These orders result in lower per-project origination fees and aircraft ferry charges. Lidar vendors used by ECORP produce elevation coordinates that meet or exceed the National Map Accuracy Standards published by the USGS.
We provide a wide variety of Lidar Services, including:
- Client consultation for lidar data collection specification development and project design
- Pre-flight data preparation
- Image classification and analysis
- Tree canopy mapping
- Vegetation mapping
- Land cover mapping
- Lidar data acquisition and analysis
- Lidar data analysis and modeling
- Topographic contour development and map production
Remote Sensing Services
ECORP uses a wide array of image processing software and analysis tools to aid in feature classification and identification from remotely sensed data.
This includes pattern recognition and feature extraction to identify specific features of interest such as individual trees, structures, and multi-band spectral image analysis for identifying trends and land cover classes.
Our remote sensing services incorporate both supervised and unsupervised classification systems for maximum flexibility. These tools are particularly useful for satisfying general plan provisions for tree canopy preservation and impact analysis. Among our Remote Services, we include:
- Feature identification and classification
- Pattern recognition
- Feature extraction
- Tree canopy surveys
- Vegetation identification and classification
Learn More about ECORP’s Lidar and Remote Sensing Services
ECORP’s Lidar and Remote Sensing Services far surpass all other data collection and mapping alternatives in terms of quality and cost-effectiveness for projects of all sizes, including those in otherwise inaccessible or heavily vegetated sites. Our exceptional staff, unmatched knowledge of regulations and processes, and professional working relationships with Federal, State, and local regulatory agencies allow us to develop a personalized solution to meet your unique project needs.
Contact ECORP today to discuss your project and learn more about our Lidar and Remote Sensing Services.