Minnesota Air Photos 2008: Contracting Process

U.S. Department of Agriculture
Farm Service Agency

The following steps outline the contracting process and timeline for digital aerial photography that was collected for the entire State of Minnesota during Summer 2008, as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP).

• A Request for Proposals was issued February 16, 2007 in a legal instrument referred to as an Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract. Responses were evaluated and a short list of six vendors was selected to provide NAIP imagery services as needed over a three year period. A copy of the RFP can be found at: http://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/usda_naip-3-07amend2.pdf (109 p., 2.1 MB, PDF).

• The Task Order that identifies specifications for 2008 NAIP projects, including Minnesota, was issued on February 15, 2008 [see: http://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/naip-to-3-08-1.pdf (112 p., 7.7 MB, PDF)].
   
• Vendor responses to the Task Order were evaluated by the USDA Aerial Photography Field Office (APFO) during the first week of April 2008.
   
• Award to a specific contractor for the Minnesota project was made on April 17, 2008 to Surdex Corporation of Chesterfield, Missouri.
   
• Flights were completed September 10, 2008; data collection took place between May and September. Surdex planned to fly six northeastern counties – Cook, Lake, St. Louis, Carlton, Koochiching and Itasca – in May to collect leaf-off imagery. Unfortunately, weather conditions were generally unfavorable, so only a small area was collected in May.
   
• Buy-up Options: Individual counties were offered the option to negotiate with the vendor for higher resolution imagery over their areas. For example, if cost-sharing county partners could be found, Surdex was prepared to fly the Arrowhead region at a lower elevation to produce two-foot resolution orthoimagery. The incremental cost of providing the higher resolution product was about $15.00 per square mile. Unfortunately, no buy-up contracts materialized due in part to the late timing in negotiating this option and the small number of partners able to finance a buy-up option. However, the offer of buy-up options for local governments will be high priority for future statewide air photo projects.
   
• Compressed County Mosaics (CCM) began to arrive in mid-September, and delivery is complete. They are 4-band (natural color plus a color infrared band) and are in JPEG 2000 format. Click here for the view/download page.
   
• Detailed QA/QC procedures, color balancing and horizontal accuracy testing were applied by APFO to the quarter-quadrangle 4-band data between September 2008 and late summer 2009; APFO then delivered the quarter-quad files (in GeoTIFF format) to MnGeo. MnGeo has distributed the quarter-quad imagery to the NAIP state funding partners.
   
• Control Point Targets: The Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Land Management Office established a network of control point targets around the state to allow this year’s imagery to be orthorectified with a higher degree of accuracy than we saw in 2003. Mn/DOT established about 100 points itself and received additional points from more than 70 counties to help densify that network of targets. In all, the goal was to establish more than 500 control points visible on the NAIP images. See Mn/DOT's accuracy report for the CCM files (4 p., 514K, PDF).

Return to Minnesota Air Photos 2008 Program Details page