NAIP helped us grow

NAIP covers the continental US with 1 meter resolution imagery that anyone can use, without fees or restrictions. Its primary purpose is to support the agricultural sector, but it’s also useful for planning, environmental monitoring, visualization, and data pipeline testing.

We know NAIP’s importance from experience. In 2014, when our satellite team was building the capacity to apply color correction to images at scale, we used NAIP as a testbed. As we’ve grown and our options have increased, its share of our imagery mix has shrunk, replaced by newer and sharper commercial data. But we wouldn’t have come as far or as fast without it, and we think that anyone with a geospatial project deserves the same resource.

To understand why it’s so crucial that NAIP is completely free, consider its scale. In 2014, we used all 8 terapixels of NAIP. At a “nominal” price of, say, $10 per square mile — which might sound reasonable if you only imagine users with local interests — that would have cost $30 million. And if it cost anything at all, licensing would have meant we couldn’t redistribute it on our basemap in the first place. NAIP as anything but truly open data wouldn’t have been useful to us. The difference between cheap and free can be enormous.

NAIP powers innovation

Imagine a professor teaching a computer vision course at a small college today. With NAIP, she can have her class run their algorithms in the cloud on a defined, reproducible dataset. They can iterate on their analytical models and try to trace every road in Chicago, or predict wolf sightings from land cover in Montana, or map all the swimming pools in the entire continental US, for just the cost of processing and bandwidth. NAIP wasn’t intended for these kinds of use, but it can and does power them — more of them than could ever be completely cataloged. Because it’s open data, that professor doesn’t have to get permission, fill out paperwork, or pay nickel-and-dime charges to use the imagery for something no one’s imagined before.