CALGARY – May 22, 2012 – An up-to-date land inventory is required for effective conservation and land-use planning. While there are numerous commercial data providers of aerial photography and remotely-sensed imagery, not all provide comprehensive geographic coverage due to the significant costs of conducting aerial surveys and imagery collection. To address this challenge, the Alberta Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development selected Esri Canada, a distributor of DigitalGlobe imagery solutions, to provide ortho-ready imagery for a 10,000-square kilometre area in northeastern Alberta.

“Alberta's economy is heavily dependent on its resource-based industries,” said Alex Miller, president, Esri Canada. “To help ensure the province's sustainability, an accurate picture of the province's resources is needed to make intelligent decisions about the best locations, benefits and environmental concerns associated with major development projects. DigitalGlobe's ortho-ready imagery reduces the cost of data acquisition and allows the Ministry to integrate the imagery directly with their geographic information system for use in analyzing and assessing Alberta's resources.”

The Ministry is responsible for conservation and land management in Alberta and maintains a land inventory that supports planning and operations. Due to the economics of imagery acquisition, various areas of the province are underserved by aerial survey companies. In particular, there is no available recent aerial photography or satellite imagery with better than 2.5m resolution for a portion of northeastern Alberta, downstream of the current oil sands operations near Fort McMurray.

To cost-effectively update its inventory of this underserved area, the Ministry acquired .5m panchromatic ortho-ready imagery from DigitalGlobe's archives, one of the world's largest with more than two billion earth images. The imagery will be further processed by Esri Canada to provide geolocation accuracy.

“In this type of application, DigitalGlobe's high-resolution, ortho-ready imagery offers significantly higher overall value relative to similar content, such as LiDAR-derived data, which is typically delivered at much lower resolution,” said Rafay Khan, senior vice president at DigitalGlobe. “In addition to the best-in-class resolution which provides the highest level of ground truth, access to our unmatched ImageLibrary ensures timely access to images that help analysts get their job done faster and more efficiently.”

For more information on Esri Canada's DigitalGlobe solution, visit esri.ca/products/digitalglobe.

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About DigitalGlobe
DigitalGlobe is a leading global provider of commercial high-resolution earth imagery products and services. Sourced from our own advanced satellite constellation, our imagery solutions support a wide variety of uses within defense and intelligence, civil agencies, mapping and analysis, environmental monitoring, oil and gas exploration, infrastructure management, Internet portals and navigation technology. With our collection sources and comprehensive ImageLibrary (containing more than two billion square kilometers of earth imagery and imagery products) we offer a range of on- and off-line products and services designed to enable customers to easily access and integrate our imagery into their business operations and applications. For more information, visit digitalglobe.com.

About Esri Canada
Founded in 1984, Esri Canada provides enterprise geographic information system (GIS) solutions that empower businesses, governments and educational institutions to make timely, informed and mission-critical decisions by leveraging the power of geography.  The company distributes the world's leading GIS software from Esri, Telvent, Cityworks – Azteca Systems, Inc. and other technology partners.  Headquartered in Toronto, the company serves over 10,000 customers from 16 regional offices across Canada and has been named as one of the top 250 Canadian IT companies and top 25 IT professional services providers in Canada by the Branham Group.  Information about Esri Canada can be found at esri.ca.

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