May 2 - 4, 2017 - NDOP 2017 Spring Meeting (Agenda - Public)

The National Digital Orthoimagery Program (NDOP) Subcommittee is responsible for developing, promoting, and executing a national strategy for acquisition or development of orthoimagery data for Federal agencies while creating and utilizing partnerships with State, local, Tribal, and private organizations and supports NSDI Strategic Plan Objective 2.2. The NDOP Subcommittee is accountable to the FGDC Steering Committee and provides recommendations to the FGDC Coordination Group. These are the policy and operational authorities, respectively, responsible for providing leadership and direction in the use and development of geospatial data and information across Federal geospatial programs and in conjunction with public, academic, and private sector partners/stakeholders.

The subcommittee accomplished the following tasks in 2016:

As the primary source of aerial imagery for the USDA, the Farm Service Agency administers the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), leveraging partnership funds from other Federal, state, and local entities to acquire imagery during the growing season over the Continental US.

• In 2016, FSA acquired nearly 1.7 million square miles of 4-band (natural color and near color infra-red) imagery in 22 states.  Fourteen states were collected at .6 meter resolution through a partnership “buy-up” option and all the remaining states are at 1 meter resolution.

• The following map depicts the number of years of NAIP acquisition by state for the Continental US.

• An innovative addition to NAIP called the Early Access Web Services (EAWS) provides minimally processed NAIP imagery via web service protocols on average between 2 and 7 business days after acquisition. This allows FSA and partner agencies to perform time sensitive work with the most current imagery available months in advance of receiving production level NAIP imagery.

• 2016 was the end of the current NAIP IDIQ.  FSA worked diligently in 2015 and 2016 to revalidate FSA and partner agency user requirements for imagery, and carried that information forward in planning for what imagery acquisition and delivery may look like in 2017 and beyond. A robust Analysis of Alternatives (AOA) and Recommended Alternative were provided for FSA Executive Leadership review and a course of action has since been approved.  FSA will extend current contracts to cover 2017 imagery needs and work throughout 2017 in an Integrated Project Team (IPT) environment to build a new IDIQ for 2018 and beyond.  The new IDIQ will align with USDA Procurement Advisory No. 101B, Shared First Policy in USDA Contracts.

• NDOP has been evaluating the new High Resolution NAIP Imagery (1 feet resolution) offered from Hexagon Corporation called Valtus.  This service contains NAIP Imagery at one feet resolution and 4-band with FGDC compliant metadata.  Valtus is offered by Hexagon as a Web Map Service compatible with ESRI ArcMap and AutoCAD.  Valtus content is supported by acquisitions from the main contractors to the NAIP program. Valtus expects most of the United States including Hawaii, Puerto Rico and sections of Alaska to be completed by the end of 2017.

NDOP has been coordinating the high resolution scanning of historic aerial photography with an emphasis on National High Altitude Program (NHAP).  NHAP was one of the first interagency geospatial programs in the Federal Government that coordinated acquisition to eliminate duplicate efforts by various government programs.  Started in 1978 by various Federal Government agencies including DOI-USGS, USDA-NRCS, USDA-FSA, USFS and many others. 

Imagery for NHAP was collected from 1980-1989 in panchromatic and color infrared. NHAP Imagery is important to many Federal/State/Local agencies.  NHAP is a critical historic geospatial Imagery layer used in many agency programs such as USDA Wetlands Reserve Program and Highly Erodible Program.

• In FY 2015, USDA-FSA-APFO and USGS-Eros Data Center along with funding support from USDA-NRCS have coordinated the scanning of NHAP. Scanned high resolution NHAP is made available to the Federal, State, Local government and private citizens from USGS-Earth Explorer (EE) site.  In FY 2014, less than 5% of the continental United States was available with high resolution NHAP.  At the end of FY 2016, approximately 70% is available via USGS-EE.

• Since 2001, coverage of Conterminous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico which included 2,233,037 images (~1,939,906 square miles) were acquired and made available to Federal Agencies as well as the general public in a standard format.  The specifications were designed to create a consistent standard orthoimagery product. I.E.: GeoTIFF format, NAD83 datum, UTM projection, each image 1500m x 1500m aligned to the United States National GRID. The data was also available for visualization via Open GIS Consortium (OGC) Compliant WMS (Web Mapping Service), REST (Representational State Transfer) and online downloads. The standard full resolution orthoimagery data volume is approximately 329 terabytes of data. Due to the cost of storage and the limitation in internet delivery speeds a decision was made in 2009 to retain the original data in the archive but compressed products using JPEG 2000 at 15:1 ratio were produced for NGA and used within the visualization web mapping services and online downloads.  The initiative fulfilled its purpose by collecting imagery, less than 1 meter resolution in a leaf-off season, for all HSIP 133 urban areas within a 2 – 3 year cycle. The imagery was placed in the public domain and many of the 133 areas have gone thru 4 to 5 acquisition cycles.
  
  

• NGA, and other Federal Agencies as well as States have been very complementary about the work performed. The partnership between NGA, USGS, and state/local agency cooperators helped to drive the costs down across the board for orthoimagery acquisitions. As budgets get tighter, 1 meter imagery and satellite imagery have become the orthoimagery products of the future and the HRO program was brought to a close in 2016. All the original HRO data has been integrated into the USGS archives and are still available through Earth Explorer interface https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/. All processing for NGA partnership data has been successfully completed with the final data delivered to NGA partners and an NGA-specific distribution portal has been retired.

• NOAA collected 96 tide controlled coastal imagery datasets to support shoreline mapping efforts.

• NOAA collected oblique imagery along the West coast and Mid-Atlantic coast for coastal zone management applications.

• NDOP members have been providing user requirements to the Requirements, Capabilities and Analysis for Earth Observations (RCA-EO) study by DOI-USGS.  RCA-EO provides data and analyses to help optimize investments in Earth observing technology and products to better meet user needs.  The RCA-EO is collecting information from NDOP members including Imagery/Elevation data types, resolution, sensors and products.

• NDOP members (USDA-NRCS, USDA-FSA, NOAA and DOD-NGA) have worked together to acquire new Orthoimagery in FY 2016 for the following areas in Hawaii and the US Pacific Basin: Hawaii, Guam, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands.

• The NDOP Technical Subcommittee held meetings during the year to discuss technical issues that affect our member agencies, with the principal goal to share information and save time and costs. In 2016, some key topics of discussion included determining requirements for Earth observation systems, aircraft and unmanned aerial systems sensor technology, new commercial satellite capabilities, and the scanning of historical film collected by traditional film cameras.