An up-to-date land inventory is required for effective conservation and land-use planning. While there are numerous commercial data providers of aerial photography and remotely-sensed imagery, not all provide comprehensive geographic coverage due to the significant costs of conducting aerial surveys and imagery collection. To address this challenge, the Alberta Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development selected Esri Canada, a distributor of DigitalGlobe imagery solutions, to provide ortho-ready imagery for a 10,000-square kilometre area in northeastern Alberta.
“Alberta’s economy is heavily dependent on its resource-based industries,” said Alex Miller, president, Esri Canada. “To help ensure the province’s sustainability, an accurate picture of the province’s resources is needed to make intelligent decisions about the best locations, benefits and environmental concerns associated with major development projects. DigitalGlobe’s ortho-ready imagery reduces the cost of data acquisition and allows the Ministry to integrate the imagery directly with their geographic information system for use in analyzing and assessing Alberta’s resources.”
The Ministry is responsible for conservation and land management in Alberta and maintains a land inventory that supports planning and operations. Due to the economics of imagery acquisition, various areas of the province are underserved by aerial survey companies. In particular, there is no available recent aerial photography or satellite imagery with better than 2.5m resolution for a portion of northeastern Alberta, downstream of the current oil sands operations near Fort McMurray.
To cost-effectively update its inventory of this underserved area, the Ministry acquired .5m panchromatic ortho-ready imagery from DigitalGlobe’s archives, one of the world’s largest with more than two billion earth images. The imagery will be further processed by Esri Canada to provide geolocation accuracy.
“In this type of application, DigitalGlobe’s high-resolution, ortho-ready imagery offers significantly higher overall value relative to similar content, such as LiDAR-derived data, which is typically delivered at much lower resolution,” said Rafay Khan, senior vice president at DigitalGlobe. “In addition to the best-in-class resolution which provides the highest level of ground truth, access to our unmatched ImageLibrary ensures timely access to images that help analysts get their job done faster and more efficiently.”
For more information on Esri Canada’s DigitalGlobe solution, visit esri.ca/products/digitalglobe.
