Continental Mapping Consultants, Inc. is pleased to announce the successful delivery of a lidar and orthophoto mapping project to the US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) for the Tualatin National Wildlife Refuge. The project was in support of ongoing inventory and monitoring activities, refuge management, landscape design, hydrogeomorphological assessments, and planned vegetation mapping efforts.

USFWS contracted with Continental Mapping to acquire aerial lidar and imagery of a 10 square mile area around  the Wapato Lake Unit and to deliver various map products including a bare earth surface, a hydro-conditioned DEM, a vegetation canopy DEM, and orthophotos. 

Continental Mapping used co-mounted imagery and lidar sensors and a helicopter to acquire the data. As part of the processing, Continental Mapping completed hydro-enforcement, hydro-conditioning, and hydro-flattening, and developed a vegetation canopy height model by extracting first return data from the point cloud. All data was delivered with FGCD compliant metadata.

"We greatly enjoyed working with Continental Mapping because they demonstrated a commitment to quality and schedule, and made adjustments when necessary," said Dave Taylor, senior land surveyor with the USFWS.  "I believe the use of a helicopter in the acquisition of the high resolution LiDAR dataset required by our project was an important component of the overall success. The deliverables exceeded our expectations, and our plan is to use this data for modeling of designs that will enable more efficient flows of water to critical habitat areas."

"This project is another example of our ability to provide coast-to-coast lidar and imagery solutions for federal agencies.  We look forward to future partnerships with the Fish & Wildlife Service," said Dave Hart President of Continental Mapping.

About Continental Mapping
Headquartered in suburban Madison, Wisconsin, Continental Mapping is a leading provider of geospatial data development services and holds a deep background on federal government projects. True to our slogan "mapping from earth, sky, and space," we offer a range of services that include full service land survey, lidar based and traditional photogrammetric mapping, and mapping and remote sensing services from commercial satellite data.