All posts by Mary Jo Wagner
Nullifying the Noise
Image above: The Trifide crew of Ginette Allen and Hélène Gagné (with Herman Lavallée who rented them the truck) had to build a wooden rack and install it on the rented truck bed to provide a stable platform for the mobile mapping system. A female surveyor stays ahead of the competition and her critics by...
Women in Surveying: An Accidental Surveyor Schools the Field
An unconventional geospatial technician oversees pre-construction and construction work for rehabbing a flood-control dam in VA. Pictured above: Evans inspects a recent concrete pour on the dam’s riser tower. “I’ve been on dozens of job sites and a lot of construction projects, and I have rarely worked with another female on site,” says Evans, a civil...
Fluid Data: GNSS and iPads
Lawrence Spencer puts the Trimble R1 GNSS receiver and iPad to work on the Kissimmee River. Pairing GNSS with iPads opens seamless data flows for a water management district in Florida facing wetlands complexity. Lawrence Spencer first joined the South Florida Water Management District’s (SFWMD) lake and river ecosystems section in 2006 as a...
A Crowning Achievement in Nepal
An ICIMOD team manually validated the accuracy of the 2011 classification maps. Pairing satellite imagery with advanced object-based image analysis helps people in Nepal better manage vital resources. For decades, the high-mountain regions of Nepal have been caught in a perpetual catch-22. The small populations of these remote, isolated areas depend nearly exclusively on local...
Capturing the Wind
A one-person crew provides foundational data for building a massive wind farm in Australia, using integrated survey technology. When you look at the commanding stature and aesthetically pleasing symmetry of the turbine towers at the Mt Mercer Wind Farm in southeast Australia, it is easy to gloss over the central role that surveying and engineering...
An Uphill Battle for Height
“You can’t change nature… But nature IS change!” – Remy in Ratatouille For decades climbers have struggled with the physical and technological hurdles of measuring the Earth’s highest mountain peaks. Now they’re turning to survey-grade GNSS equipment to measure extraordinary heights. It may surprise you to learn that the majority of the world’s mountains do...