As part of a proposed Voluntary Stewardship Program with the State of Washington, Skagit County has been faced with tracking vegetation changes in riparian areas within Agricultural zones. The process of heads up digitizing can be very time consuming and in many cases subjective. In addition a challenge is that the monitoring needs to have a start date of 2011. Josh Greenberg has been working with Pictometry International with a new process that creates a 3D surface based off the oblique images captured by Pictometry flight products. A test location in Skagit County was used to determine if this 3D photo derived surface (PhoDar) can be helpful for monitoring vegetation change. Preliminary results proved very successful but need some additional work before final use.
