Greetings everyone,
In the past two weeks, based on expected upcoming USGS stimulus funding for LiDAR projects, we have put together a proposal to do coastal LiDAR for all of New England. The 'we' is Dan Walters, Joe Young, Nancy Armentrout, and yours truly, with input from and based on an earlier proposal by Fay Rubin.
You may read the proposal at http://megis.maine.gov
I wanted to make you aware of this effort to begin drumming up support. The actual USGS award announcement has not been made yet, so at this time there is a bit of guesswork involved, but we are fairly confident a total of $12M will be made available for LiDAR, and that coastal New England is a priority area.
In the coming days I may be asking you for letters of support to help with the proposal. Also if you are plugged in to other federal sources of LiDAR funding, it would be great wherever possible to combine those. One of our goals in all of this is to tie FEMA LiDAR collections in with the project and capitalize on their planned expenditures. Also feel free to share this with anybody else who might benefit from the resulting data.
If you have any comments or questions about this feel free to contact me.
Those of you on the GIS Stakeholders group (meeting tomorrow), this will be an agenda item.
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Michael Smith
State GIS Manager
Maine Office of GIS