A Phoenix-based landscaping company tries mobile mapping to collect “big data” quickly for a plant density study. Their high-tech solutions illustrate the increasing importance of spatial data management for everyone. When people think about landscaping, “high tech” doesn’t immediately come to mind. After all, this is work involving dirt, manual labor, and plants. Mechanical engineering may...

From Science and Engineering to Your Hydrographic Toolkit “The complexities of and incubation times for advancing instrumentation are often not fully appreciate ”—T. Curtin, E. Belcher, Innovation in Oceanographic Instrumentation (2008) Extraordinary—yet mostly unseen—innovations continue to shape the tools surveyors use on water and land: innovations in science and engineering for hydrography, oceanography, robotics, and global navigation...

A surveying firm based in the United Kingdom leverages its terrestrial 3D scanning and modeling expertise into a new market: marine and shipping applications.In February this magazine showed how Fenstermaker and Associates expanded their firm by successfully employing “Diversification through Scanning.” Now we take the idea another step to a firm with extensive 3D scanning experience that is...

Think about what ties together the following challenges put forth in this issue. How do surveyors develop new markets for your services? How can you objectively examine a controversial boundary-surveying subject? How can you enrich mapping with extended data? And how is it that researchers dream up cutting-edge technologies surveyors use on land and in...