Maintenance and management of solid waste disposal sites includes various tasks such as landfill inspection, reporting, planning and monitoring. Recent advancements in contemporary mapping technology enabled easier management of these activities, as we can see in various landfill management projects. One example is drone mapping which is used for capturing high-quality and up-to-date spatial data and tracking the status of a waste disposal site.
Technology advancements and the emergence of big data mapping systems with great accuracy began to rise multiple questions which are becoming more and more relevant: how should we use collected data, how to filter it, how to share it, how to collaborate?*One of the common problems with using big data in different drone mapping projects is connecting all the stakeholders in a particular project, in a real time, with different privileges assigned to different users. How to use and share big raster data sets generated with drones?
In this article, you can read a bit more about using GIS Cloud as collaboration solution in a landfill remediation project, where a survey firm used drone generated images as a basemap for a project plan and monitoring, in coordination with local government agency.
Project Info
Our clients were contracted by the Environmental Protection Agency for the purpose of mapping, monitoring and tracking the status of local sanitation landfill in order to:
1. track and record local sanitary landfill status
2. create a landfill remediation plan
3. conduct monitoring through a 2-year remediation period (2015-2017)
4. produce reports on annual and semi-annual basis, which includes creating digital terrain models and issuing waste volumetric reports.
This project was launched as a legal requirement under the local government jurisdiction and funded through the Environmental Protection Agency. Our clients were required to submit reports to the Agency and local government officials who used this data for submitting to the Office of the Federal Register.
The challenge of collaboration
First task on the agenda for creating a landfill remediation plan was to find a way to include survey firm staff, external associates and landfill management into an effective workflow. Previously, this task took a significant amount of time because they used desktop GIS solutions which required them to manually copy large datasets on DVDs and use printed versions of maps. They wanted to improve the procedure and try to save time and money needed for the project execution. This required a tool for a real-time collaboration between the stakeholders, which was also essential for later phases of a project (monitoring of the remediation process).
Workflow
The surveying firm used drones to map about 20 acres of sanitary landfill area, so that they could produce high-quality orthomosaic data and create digital terrain models and issue initial waste volumetric report. After processing a large amount of quality data, these imagery was used as a basemap for further collaboration on a project.
After processing drone generated images, our clients used GIS Cloud’s*Map Editor*for attaching different types of information (photos from the field, waste volumetric information, pdf documents and reports) to a landfill map.