How Polk County Used Aerial Imagery to Create Custom GIS Solutions

How EagleView and Polk County worked together to create custom GIS solutions for multiple departments.

Background
At a Glance

1/3

of imagery now hosted with EagleView Image Service

30

days saved in image delivery time

12

departments using EagleView Image Service

Polk County sits in the center of the state of Iowa, and is also home to Des Moines, the state’s capital and largest city by population. GIS Architect David Dodds coordinates GIS work across many of the county’s departments, including Conservation, Public Works, Health, Attorney services and the Sheriff’s office. Only the Auditor’s and Assessor’s offices have their own dedicated GIS staff, leaving the rest of these diverse GIS needs to David. With this much responsibility, he needs an efficient solution to be able to focus on what he does best.

Polk has used EagleView’s aerial imagery since 2008, and recently started contracting annual flights. David says that this aerial imagery is key to making GIS available and comprehensible to all these departments.

EagleView Quote

"The easier I can make it for people to use GIS, the more they want to do it, and the GIS will help them work as one."

EagleView Customer Image

David Dodds

GIS Architect

Polk County IA

Challenge

While aerial imagery is an essential piece of the user experience for employees using GIS, the size and detail of imagery files can come with additional challenges. Not only does this data need sufficient storage, but larger file sizes require more bandwidth to deliver, more time to render, and more work to prepare and maintain. If David were using the county’s systems to host it, he says “it would probably take the better part of a day just to render the imagery.”

Top-down images alone may not show everything. For example, when assigning an address to a property with multiple structures, it’s important to be able to determine which one is the home and which is a barn. As David points out, “You don’t want to send an ambulance to the wrong end of the property.”

Another challenge is that when working across this many departments, clear communication becomes essential. Dealing with separate imagery files could make it unclear what the most recent or accurate images are and what version of a map is current.

Solution

Fortunately, Polk County doesn‘t have to host EagleView imagery on their own network to have access. By having EagleView host the imagery captured for the county through EagleView Image Service, David can make a wider range of yearly imagery available to his departments with fewer steps. This service is updated automatically as soon as their contracted imagery becomes available, which saves up to 30 days in delivery time when compared to the average turnaround for shipping imagery on a hard drive.

“I can manage GIS instead of being the GIS technician all the time,” says David. “I don’t have to prep it, back it up or update it. I just have to point to the URL.”

The oblique, or angled, imagery EagleView provides offers more context than top-down alone, and having a single source of imagery also simplifies the issue of file versions. Members of different departments can go to the website, sort by the year they’re looking for, and see the same imagery from all the angles they need.

“It makes it more authoritative,” David says. “Users have more confidence in what they’re seeing and it becomes something they can start relying on.”

Impact

1/3

of imagery now hosted with EagleView Image Service

30

days saved in image delivery time

12

departments using EagleView Image Service

So far, Polk County has five years of imagery – a third of their total – hosted with EagleView Image Service.

"That's only going to grow, but my footprint won’t,” says David. “That’s what I like.”

Working with EagleView comes with other benefits that make GIS coordination a smoother process. When the Emergency Operations department needed imagery integration for their existing software, EagleView set up an API to connect imagery directly to the mapping program with no change to the department’s workflow. EagleView also provides a low distortion projection for Public Works, eliminating the need for this department to change the projection themselves and risk errors.

David feels that the shorter he can make the path for staff to find answers with GIS, the more his job is a success. As he puts it, “The easier I can make it for people to use GIS, the more they want to do it, and the GIS will help them work as one.

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