8 benefits of monitoring projects with aerial maps
Apr 2022
Aerial imagery provides the perfect solution for site surveys and planning, allowing you to inspect your infrastructure projects from the comfort of your office.
Apr 2022
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Saving time and money, inspecting a project without leaving the office, better decision-making, improved site safety, and more informed site plans and surveys. These are just some of the benefits of aerial imagery.
1. Conduct Site Inspections without Sending out a Team
Infrastructure sites are often a long way from the office and making vital regular inspections to check progress can generate significant costs in time and money. Good project managers are always looking for ways to be more efficient. High-resolution imagery from Nearmap, which is higher quality than satellite images, gives an extraordinarily accurate and detailed view of an environment and its surroundings, helping you see a true picture of a site. With powerful tools for remote measurement – accessible through MapBrowser, our web-based app – you can easily conduct land measurements, including length, width, height, area, and radius.
Nearmap AI enables the easy detection of ground features, like vegetation spread, construction sites, roof materials, pavements, power poles and roads, helps you review your infrastructure assets, and create the best possible site plan.
Location intelligence from Nearmap is consistently 5.5cm-7.5cm GSD (ground sampling distance) per pixel, offering unrivaled clarity and precision several times sharper than free satellite imagery, which also goes out of date quickly.
Construction contracts, construction drawings, and site plans can be quicker to create in the scope, planning, and design phases of a project. Construction project managers can even conduct rigorous feasibility studies to evaluate a project before undertaking significant expenditure.
2. Prepare and Respond to Natural Disasters
Unexpected floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and fires can be disastrous for any large infrastructure project and pose significant safety issues. MapBrowser doesn’t require any GIS software or expertise and can be easily accessed through a desktop or tablet, so field teams can stay informed wherever they are.
Comparing our rich library of imagery dating back more than 10 years, with more current captures, helps you understand how an area has evolved and continues to change, and can point to what action is needed.
You can also easily detect the proximity of vulnerable property boundaries to areas prone to catastrophe and mitigate risk before the next major event hits.
ImpactResponse, our disaster capture program, can be used to better understand the effects of damage and debris after an event so you can shift focus where it’s most needed.
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3. Receive Regular Remote Updates
Nearmap flies frequently, capturing imagery that covers more than 80% of the U.S. population – including 1,740 urban and regional areas across 308,000 unique square miles — with more coverage added every year. Some areas are mapped up to three times a year enabling you to make accurate and meaningful virtual inspections of your sites.
For every location included in our coverage, you can access the number of planned captures per year, as well as the type of content (vertical, oblique and 3D) available for the area.
This means you can trust your regular remote updates are showing a true picture of your project’s progress and deal with any problems quickly and efficiently, without having to coordinate a site visit.
4. Explore with Historical Data
It’s simple to explore an area and see how it has changed over time with more than 10 years of historical imagery at your fingertips. This data enables you to see how a project has developed over time, reveal any past scheduling or operational problems, or even allow you to see a site before a project began to see how it is affected by seasonal changes. Historical data can be a detailed change analysis engine, as time is a critical fourth dimension in revealing the status of a location
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Construction underway in Montgomery, AL
5. Make Better Safety Plans
Large infrastructure projects are inherently dangerous places, so reducing site visits improves safety. Being able to view rooftops and other high, hard to reach places from above means inspectors don’t need to climb structures or work from heights to see a snapshot of a project’s progress. Aerial imagery can also be used for site surveying, plan and control procurement, transportation, and the stationing of workers and materials in phases to improve safety and minimize disruption to the local community and businesses.
6. Save Time
Access to the most up-to-date and accurate data keeps projects on time and on budget. Nearmap collects data quickly and efficiently, removing the need to have a person undertake the tedious and time-consuming task of tracking multiple data points. With cloud-based, remote access to high-resolution aerial imagery, project managers, planners, and designers can conduct virtual walkthroughs of complicated projects on demand and limit expenditure on costly drone flyovers. A Nearmap subscription can be set up in minutes and doesn’t require additional complicated third-party software.
7. Enhance Documentation
Projects benefit from the ability of Nearmap to generate imagery and geo-referenced data that can be used to design beautiful plans and presentations that provide unique context and clarity. This enhances client and stakeholder understanding and buy-in. Nearmap images not only contain unparalleled detail, they can also be highly aesthetically pleasing and fascinating to viewers, and imagery can be exported in impressive high resolution. Development applications are also strengthened with Nearmap data and can significantly speed up the approvals process and improve compliance. If there are gaps in your documentation that need verification, there’s no need to go on-site. Simply check in remotely and keep your processes on deadline across the lifecycle of your project.
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Create detailed site maps and highlight features with Nearmap AI
8. Manage Client Expectations
Visualizing requires accuracy, which ensures you’re meeting your client’s needs every step of the way. Our powerful, AI-derived attributes allow for easy feature extraction, helping you to identify true ground insights across an area of land. Shadow and line-of-sight issues can be easily discovered with Nearmap 3D, which allows true immersion into a site and its surrounds with detailed 3D models.
“Nearmap AI has been a key tool as we plan for the future. We’ve been able to observe trends in order to design smarter green spaces.”
Lindsay Mason,Head of Land InformationTo learn more about the benefits of monitoring large infrastructure sites with aerial intelligence, and why 9 of the top 15 engineering firms in the U.S. rely on Nearmap, reach out today.