All posts by Richard Thomas
The Private Geospatial Firm as Data Steward
The MAPPS community sits at the center of a transition most of its clients haven’t fully named yet. The firms that articulate it first will own the conversation. For most of its history, the private geospatial services firm has been defined by what it delivers: orthophotos, LiDAR point clouds, photogrammetric products, hydrographic surveys, corridor maps....
Seeing Through the Water: Inside Leica’s CoastalMapper
The new four-channel bathymetric sensor redefines what airborne hydrographic surveying can cover — and how fast Airborne bathymetric lidar has always been a physics argument. The physics are largely fixed: green laser light at 532 nanometers penetrates water in ways that infrared does not, but the water column itself attenuates the signal, and the degree...
Worlds Colliding: Sensor Fusion, Platform Modularity, and the New Architecture of Geospatial Data Collection
At Geo Week 2026 in Denver, one of the industry’s most experienced voices in multi-sensor positioning argues that the real transformation isn’t in any single instrument — it’s in how the instruments learn to work together. Mohamed Mostafa has been thinking about sensor fusion longer than most people in the geospatial industry have been using...
Brave New Coordinates: What NSRS Modernization Means for Survey and GIS Practice
NAD 83, NAVD 88 and “SPCS ’83” are finally giving way to a modern, GNSS- and gravity-based National Spatial Reference System. The technical pieces are arriving now. For surveyors and GIS professionals, the hard work will be managing the transition while keeping projects on track. For more than a decade, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS)...
Measuring Change at Scale: FARO’s Mass-Data Vision for Digital Reality
At INTERGEO 2025 in Frankfurt, FARO®, a business of AMETEK®, Inc. wasn’t just celebrating a milestone, it was making a case for how 20 years of terrestrial laser scanning experience feeds directly into the next wave of GIS: mass data, AI-ready point clouds and digital twins that help societies manage infrastructure at scale. “All of...
Vexcel: How a Camera Company Turned Itself into a Global Data Engine
From film scanners to hybrid camera-LiDAR systems and a 43-country data program, Vexcel’s CEO Alexander Wiechert described the journey leading to the current product line in a conversation with xyHt at INTERGEO in Frankfurt. By Richard Thomas, Executive Editor Walking past the Vexcel booth at INTERGEO 2025, you see Merlin, Osprey 4.2, Condor and Dragon 4.2 front...