The Maine Office of
GIS (MEGIS) is pleased to announce that our proposal for USGS ARRA lidar
collection has been selected for full funding, with the data collection to take
place this Fall. Although we had received tentative notification
of our selection in January, the confirmation finally came
today. This project will collect new lidar and collate existing lidar into
a single regional dataset stretching from Manhattan to Cobscook Bay. The
combined area is 13,500 square miles, covers 10,500 linear miles of coastline,
and is home to roughly 20M people and 7.5M households. This is the first
phase in what is a larger New England-wide goal of high-resolution terrain
mapping.
Note: For
those of you wondering what lidar is - think of radar but with laser pulses,
coming out of a machine mounted in the bottom of an airplane, pulsing
almost 200,000 times per second. The returns from the pulses are measured
by a sensor in the plane and can precisely map the terrain of an area. This
geospatial technology is very useful for a number of applications including
floodplain mapping, finding sites for windmills, mapping habitat, modeling sea
level rise, etc. The terrain data provided come at a resolution 10 times
better and with accuracy 20 times better than what is currently
available. These data will greatly improve the region's ability to deal
with climate change, flooding, erosion, and other coastal issues. For more
details on lidar see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar.
This project, led by Maine, included the
cooperation of GIS contacts in each of the partner states - New Hampshire,
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York, with matching funding
from a number of federal and state agencies, and non-profit organizations.
Over 50 supporting letters were also provided, including two state governors
(Connecticut and Maine), government agencies at all levels, tribes,
non-profits, and commercial interests. Financial partners in Maine
included Acadia National Park, Maine DEP, Maine GeoLibrary, Maine State
Planning Office, USDA, The Nature Conservancy, and the Maine Coast Heritage
Trust.
The total project
value is $2.7M, with $1.4M coming from ARRA funds, $385K from cash match, and
$915K from in-kind contributions. Maine's portion totals $823K in value,
with $487K from ARRA funds, $156K from cash match, and $180K from in-kind
contributions. Over the next few weeks MEGIS and the other partners will
begin working with USGS to flesh out the details of the cooperative agreement
and contracts for Fall collection of lidar data.