John Copple, CEO of Sanborn, announced that the company has been selected by the United States Department of Agriculture to provide aerial photography and imagery acquisition services in accordance with USDA-NAIP-03-04.
To complete this project, Sanborn will fly over parts of Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, and South Dakota between June and September 2004. Sanborn will obtain aerial imagery covering an area of over 200,000 square miles of agricultural land. The company will then process the imagery and deliver over 14,500 digital ortho quarter quads (DOQQs) to the USDA within 30 days of acquisition.
The goal of the National Agriculture Imagery Program is to acquire updated, accurate imagery of all agricultural lands in the continental United States annually and deliver it to USDA service centers within a few months of collection. The program is unique because the photography must be acquired during peak crop growing periods.
The imagery Sanborn provides will be used by the USDA to update its GIS orthoimagery base program and by the Financial Services Authority to administer compliance programs. Additionally, the information will be used for agriculture land use analysis, natural resource inventory, and data extraction by means of photogrammetric measurements.
The imagery acquisition process must meet two primary USDA requirements. Imagery must be provided quickly to USDA Service Centers for mandated annual compliance review, and it must be orthorectified so that the updated information can serve as the base layer for the GIS.
