ISSAQUAH, Wash., June 27, 2014 — (PRNewswire) —   Earthdefine, a provider of high-resolution land cover products, has released the first statewide Canopy Height Model (CHM) for the state of Indiana. The SpatialCover CHM product provides spatially explicit information on canopy height across the state of Indiana by mapping tree overstory height above ground as a continuous surface. Earthdefine has shared a colorized map derived from the tree canopy data showing the variation in tree canopy heights across Indiana on Google Maps Engine gallery for easy visualization of the CHM. The tree data complements the 1m SpatialCover Land Cover Indiana (2011-13) dataset providing baseline land cover information for the state.

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"In the past, LIDAR processing has been prohibitively expensive for large areas with high point density data. This is mainly due to the large volume of data and computation involved in dealing with point clouds," said Earthdefine CEO, Vikalpa Jetly. "Adapting distributed computing technologies to geospatial data over large commodity computing clusters has enabled us to combine multiple large data sources in a streamlined workflow to create the Indiana datasets in a cost effective manner."  Earthdefine has developed a high throughput Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) platform that allows the creation of high-resolution geospatial products while seamlessly integrating different geodata streams in a single workflow. The canopy height model and land cover layers were created through fusing over 8 terabytes of geospatial data from sources including Lidar and 4-band orthoimagery flown for Indiana between 2011-13 and National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery from 2012. These datasets were processed through a rule based classification system using Earthdefine's GEOBIA platform.

The SpatialCover CHM product provides tree canopy information for any area of interest in Indiana for supporting applications like Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) assessments, vegetation risk assessment for utility infrastructure, monitoring forest metrics, forest logging and recovery, mapping habitat suitability, assessing fire risk etc.

For more information on Earthdefine products, visit www.earthdefine.com.

Contact: Vikalpa Jetly, Email, 1-800-579-5916

SOURCE Earthdefine