EMERGE Delivers 1 ft Imagery for Wetland Delineation

Town of Wayland Finds “Perfect Match” for Historic Data from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

ANDOVER, MA, June 10, 2002 – EMERGE, a leader in providing high quality digital imagery, has grown its customer base to include smaller towns and cities that need up-to-date, ready-to-go data.

The Town of Wayland, MA, with a population of about 14, 000, covers 15 square miles. The town has a long history of GIS use, beginning in 1994, and owns aerial photography from the 1950s through 1977. To keep up with wetlands management and protection, the town most recently turned to MassGIS, the Commonwealth's office of geographic and environmental information, that provides a free statewide data set of 1 meter black and white orthophotos captured in 1994. While the free imagery was quite welcome, wetland identification is limited in black and white.

With funding from the town´s conservation fees, the Survey Department set out to purchase fresh imagery. Rich Ames, GIS Coordinator, decided on color infrared, which helps highlight wetland vegetation, and sought a company to provide 1 ft (0.3 meter) imagery. “EMERGE provided exactly what we wanted, Ames explains, “1 ft imagery, projected to NAD 27, color balanced and unenhanced.” Ames has experience in image processing and preferred to perform the enhancement himself.

“We were extremely happy with the quality and accuracy. We loaded it in the GIS and it matched exactly with our previous imagery, including the MassGIS orthos. It also overlayed our parcel layer perfectly. When there were errors, they were on our side.”

EMERGE flew Wayland in March 2002 and delivered imagery in April. In addition to its use in wetlands issues, the imagery will also grace the town ´s soon-to-be online Web GIS. EMERGE´s open licensing gives the town remarkable freedom in how the data is used. The town surveyor uses the imagery as background for surveys. For a recent local event, Riverfest, which celebrated the naming of 29 miles of the Sudbury, Assabet and Concord Rivers part of the national Wild and Scenic River System, requested plots of the imagery. Says Ames, “Now that we´ve received the imagery, neighboring town who´ve had a peek are anxious to explore the possibilities.”

EMERGE provides high quality digital orthorectified mosaic imagery products for a variety of land use applications serving state, county, municipal and federal governmental agencies, forestry, agriculture, transportation, energy providers and public utilities. Using a patented collection process integrating GPS and IMU technology, the imagery is geometrically and radiometrically corrected for use in land management, mapping and GIS applications. The high-resolution aerial imagery is collected with typical resolutions of 0.3 to 1-meter in natural color or color infrared. EMERGE operates the largest nationwide fleet of aircraft equipped with a digital sensor system to meet the small and large scale project needs of its customers. Further details can be found at the EMERGE website, .

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Source: Material used in press releases is often supplied by external sources and used as is.