Open imagery is essential
NAIP must remain open and free
By: Tom Lee
The geospatial industry has always benefitted from open data. That’s truer now than ever before, with publicly funded datasets from the Landsat archive to real-time weather radar enabling public and private innovation. The National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) is an integral part of that thriving imagery ecosystem, which is why we recently wrote about the threat to NAIP’s continued existence as open data.
Since publishing our post, we’ve seen many other accounts of NAIP’s importance as open data, from major satellite companies to independent consultants. Here are a few representative testimonials:
Just as highways enabled the whole automotive and modern logistics industries, so too do open datasets like NAIP enable the whole geospatial industry. New companies can build valuable products and services by leveraging the value that is open to all. And they are doing so with NAIP today — for the year of 2017, one external source of data access saw nearly a half million programmatic requests for the data from roughly 15,000 unique IP addresses corresponding to access of 650TB of freely available NAIP data. Without a baseline of foundational open data in the United States, we believe geospatial innovation and value creation would be unnecessarily throttled.
The USDA’s FSA proposal for a new acquisition strategy of NAIP imagery seems best to be viewed as a cost-savings effort, a commendable and challenging act in most government budget offices. However, the proposal to use commercial imagery for the NAIP, and the associated licensing restrictions that might prevent broad distribution, would result in a significant loss to the public.
Randal Hale, North River Geographic Systems:
I use NAIP almost weekly for volunteer work with local non-profits. Several of these organizations rely on NAIP to make decisions on areas where they can make an impact for clean water or for land to be protected from development. They can’t afford commercial imagery and LANDSAT is too coarse for what they need.
I also use NAIP in my commercial consulting life. Many of my customers are small businesses around the Georgia/Tennessee area. NAIP provides these firms the opportunity to use aerial imagery to make informed decisions with regard to forestry, agriculture, and environmental concerns. The temporal span of NAIP is important. Most of my clients have the ability to look back on over a decade or more of imagery to see changes to the landscape. It’s a very important resource with an important economic impact that will be felt if this resource goes away.
Calvin Harmin, GIS Specialist for the Town of Fuquay-Varina:
NAIP going to a closed/paid model would be a barrier not just for myself but for all the other people like me, in college or in GIS/environmental research positions, or in organizations that do not easily resort to paid services for non-critical issues.
NAIP as a public resource allows me to freely explore all kinds of answers to small and large questions as they arise. Those questions (and answers) would probably be abandoned to the pile of “not worth it” by managers if NAIP became a paid service.
These statements represent only a small fraction of the ways NAIP is used. From protecting endangered songbirds; to detecting sinkholes; to commercial crop yield analyses; to finding unmapped roads; to studying how trees improve urban air quality; to researching electrical generation and distribution, the applications for NAIP that exist outside of USDA’s specific mandate for the dataset are vast and important.
The usage numbers cited by Planet for a single NAIP data redistributor in a single year should give pause to anyone who doubts the impact of NAIP going closed: “nearly a half million programmatic requests for the data from roughly 15,000 unique IP addresses corresponding to access of 650TB of freely available NAIP data.” A license change would mean that all of this redistribution would be rendered impossible. How much of this use would become merely more expensive and how much would cease to happen at all? Past experience with open data suggests that the latter of these would be the larger and more worrisome effect of closing NAIP.
There’s still time to make our case that NAIP should remain free and open, and a number of ways to get involved:
- Attend NorCal URISA’s NAIP Public Forum this Thursday, January 25, in person or via the web. You can RSVP here.
- Join the Save the NAIP mailing list to contribute your own story and be alerted to developments and advocacy opportunities.
- I’ll be speaking about NAIP at the NSGIC Midyear Conference next month. If you’ll be there, let’s connect about how you use NAIP and what we can do to preserve it.
