Surveying throughout the county began last week as the Lee County Cooperative's Aerial Project took off.
The aerial project, which takes place every three years, combines aerial photography with LiDAR technology, which measures elevation, to form a map of the county.
The map contains details including building and road edges and elevation changes.
Auburn has collected this data every three years since 1997.
"What's different about the project this year is we're doing the entire county, and we're working in cooperation with Lee County, so you have Opelika and the University as well," said Project Manager Christopher Graff, geographic information systems professional for the city of Auburn.
In the past, each city and the county have collected the data separately, but this year different entities in Lee County have combined funds to hire an outside contractor to collect the data.
Planning for this year's project began in spring 2010 and will be completed in summer 2011.
The cost of the entire project for the county was just less than $400,000, Graff said.
The data collected could end up saving the county money because it will eliminate the cost of hiring separate contractors for every project.
Otherwise, Graff said, the cost of hiring surveyors for individual projects would be millions of dollars.
"It's kind of industry practice to do these as your way of collecting data," Graff said. "It's so much more cost effective. Here you get a nice, clean, uniform data set that was all from one period of time."
Kucera International, Inc., the contractor responsible for completing the project, sent its survey crew out last week to begin by placing X and Y-shaped markers throughout the county. These white markers were painted on the shoulders of the roads.
Kucera's high-precision GPS will pick up the painted markers to tie the photographs together to form one coherent map.
Data collection is set to begin at the end of January, pending weather conditions.
"We schedule for basically a week, so sometime the last week of the month, they'll come down, or they'll watch the weather and when they find a window of two to three days, then they'll fly down," Graff said.
Graff said the maps are available to the public through the city's website, and nearly all of the data is stored in the digital resource library on campus for the University students' use.
The data and maps provide a valuable resource for city as well as private projects.
"If you're using it to plan out an outbuilding in the back of your property, we're happy to let you do that," Graff said, "or developers that are putting in a new subdivision, we're going to work with them and share with them the data they need.
"It helps them build a better project, which results in a better city."
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