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Ohio Historical Imagery GIS Services

Historical Imagery for Ohio

As I said in my previous post, I thought I would show off some of the geoinformatics applications that I have been involved with during my career. This next application has some really great and stunning applications.

While I was working as a GIS Systems Administrator, another earth science informatics project that I led involved creating GIS REST services of all available historical imagery for the state of Ohio. GIS REST services are the primary way web clients (i.e. interactive web maps) communicate with geographic information system (GIS) servers through Representational State Transfer (REST) technology.

One of the primary reasons for doing this type of project was to duplicate and ultimately exceed the historical imagery offered by Google Earth. The historical imagery in Google Earth is a proprietary dataset. We wanted to include all known and publicly available historical imagery in our GIS desktop, web map, and our mobile data collection solutions. A good example of a web map solution with historical imagery is the ODNR Coastal Engineering Interactive Map (https://gis.ohiodnr.gov/MapViewer/?config=Engineering).

In order to make the historical imagery available, we created raster tile caches of all our historical imagery data.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) has been collecting aerial photo imagery for almost 50 years. Airphotos have been collected for many of the properties owned by ODNR, such as state parks, state Forests, and State Wildlife Areas. Airphotos were also collected for many coal mine reclamation projects in southeastern Ohio. In addition, ODNR has been partnering with the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to collect imagery since the early 1950's to early 1960s.

Here are some examples on how the historical imagery can be used.

Lake Erie Coastal Erosion

In this example, we have aerial photos imagery from 1954 and 2015, there has been approximately 675 feet of erosion. This area near Painesville on the Lake, Lake County, Ohio has some of the highest erosion rates along the Ohio's Lake Erie coastline.


1954 Aerial Photo, Painesville on the Lake, Lake County, Ohio


2015 Aerial Photo, Painesville on the Lake, Lake County, Ohio

Locating Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells

Another application for the historical imagery is locating abandoned oil and gas wells. In the imagery below, a number small woody areas are located within this farm field. These woody areas represent the locations whereby oil and gas well casings are sticking up above the land surface. The farmer plows around these oil and gas well casings in order to not damage his plow or the harvesting machinery. The first image shows the field with the small woody areas, the second image shows the locations of many of the known oil and gas wells, the third image shows the color infrared (CIR) imagery of the field, and the final image shows the CIR with the oil and gas well locations. The CIR imagery is useful for looking differences in vegetation.


2006 Aerial Photo, south of Cygnet, Wood County, Ohio


2006 Aerial Photo with the locations of the historical oil and gas wells, south of Cygnet, Wood County, Ohio


2006 color infrared imagery, south of Cygnet, Wood County, Ohio


2006 color infrared imagery, south of Cygnet, Wood County, Ohio

Mine Subsidence

Here is a final example of using using historical imagery for finding geologic hazards. Underground coal mining has been active in eastern and southeastern Ohio since 1800. In Ohio, there are a number of examples of collapse of abandoned underground mines, which produce subsidence at the surface of the earth. Here is an example from south of Byesville, Guernsey County, Ohio, next to the I-77 Rest Area. There are two prominent circular ponds in the center of the image, which represent pit subsidence collapse features.


2006 imagery, south of Byesville, Guernsey County, Ohio

Additional Resources

Here is the list of the Historical Imagery GIS Services from ODNR, typically raster tile caches, Web Mercator projection:

Statewide Aerial Imagery


Statewide Color Infrared Imagery


Statewide Topographic Maps


Lake Erie Coastal Aerial and Color Infrared Imagery


Project-based Aerial Imagery

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank Tim Beck, GIS Specialists, for compiling the many of the raster tile caches, Mark Anstaett, GIS Application Developer, for automating many of the raster tile cache processes, and Donovan Powers, ODNR CIO, for allowing this project to happen

Go ahead and explore!
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Location: Ohio, USA

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