May / June 2026 Archives
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. […]
Leave No Fingerprints: Survey-Grade Accuracy in an Era of Zero Disruption
There is a version of a great survey that nobody even notices happened. No lane closures. No overnight crews in reflective vests. No targets bolted to deck surfaces. No personnel standing on live structures. No disruption to the vessels passing underneath or the aircraft taxiing overhead. The infrastructure keeps operating exactly as it did before […]
The Image as Evidence
Time-stamped, location-aware imagery has quietly crossed a threshold from documentation to trusted record. The geospatial profession is now in the business of producing evidence — and the standards have not caught up to the stakes. A surveyor flying a bridge deck, a GIS technician cataloging post-storm damage, a mapping firm delivering obliques to an insurer: […]
The Chain That Counts
Four specialists on what actually separates a drone data product from a deliverable a surveyor will stamp The unmanned systems industry has spent a decade getting very good at one thing: flying. The airframes are capable, the sensors are capable, and the regulatory framework, while still evolving, is no longer the primary bottleneck it was […]
The Right Tool for the Right Layer: How Tetra Tech Rooney Is Rethinking Reality Capture
A Design Technology Manager at one of the nation’s largest engineering and technical services firms explains why a mixed-capture strategy — terrestrial scanner, SLAM, drone, and phone — beats any single technology approach. Tetra Tech is one of the largest engineering and technical services firms in the United States, a publicly traded company with operations […]
Inventing the Workflow: How Phoenix LiDAR Helped Build the Market It Now Serves
When Grayson Omans, founder and CEO of Phoenix LiDAR Systems, described the company’s transition into its next chapter following the Revolution Geo Systems acquisition, he did not sound like a man delivering a polished exit line. He sounded like someone who had spent years living inside the pressure of building a company and was finally ready […]