GeoBase portal provides data on roads, vegetation free to public
ITBussiness.ca, Canadian Technology News
by Shane Schick
Renewed funding for a satellite imaging portal project by Natural Resources Canada will mean Canadians get a closer look at the country’s roads, wetlands and vegetation.
Gary Lunn, Minister of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) announced $2.4 million over the next five years for the project, which will also involve Telus Corp. and a few other firms. The announcement was made at the 2006 Geomatics Leadership Summit in Ottawa.
The portal, GeoBase, is available for free to the public and was first launched in 2002. It contains scores of images which the government uses to monitor the health of forests, the delineation of wetlands and the level of floods or rivers when they rise in the spring. Other partners in the project include Agriculture and Agri-Food, National Defence, Environment, Parks, Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness.
According to Jeff Labonte, director general of NRCan’s data management dissemination branch in the Earth Sciences sector, the cost of satellite imagery may be going down but the cost for greater accuracy is not. The investment will go towards improving the degree to which details can be seen from 15 metres away to seven, not unlike the way digital cameras have brought greater resolution on a megapixel basis.
“Fifteen years ago, the best you could get was 25 metres,” he said. “Anything smaller than that and you couldn’t see it.”
Some of the data from GeoBase is used by Google as part of its Google Earth portal…
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