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Riverside, California

The Inland Empire: a conservation plan, a river and hills on fire.

Western Riverside County grows faster than almost anywhere in the state inside one of the largest habitat conservation plans in the country, along a river the region is restoring, below hills that burn. Habitat mapping, fuels and the terrain of a building boom are the flights that fit, with the citrus groves that founded the city still on the map.

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The ground

Riverside and Riverside County and San Bernardino County

The city sits on the Santa Ana River where it cuts between the Box Springs Mountains and the Jurupa Hills, with the parent navel orange tree still growing downtown and the last citrus groves in the Arlington Heights greenbelt. The valley fills with warehouses and subdivisions from Corona to Moreno Valley; above them the Santa Ana Mountains to the south west and the San Bernardinos to the north east burn in most decades, the Holy fire in 2018 and the Apple fire in 2020 among them. The conservation plan's reserve lands lie across all of it.

Who buys mapping here

  • City of Riverside: Parks, Recreation and Community Services and the urban forestry program, Public Works, Riverside Public Utilities, the GIS group
  • Riverside County: the Fire Department with CAL FIRE's Riverside Unit, Parks and Open Space, Transportation and Land Management, Emergency Management
  • The Western Riverside County Regional Conservation Authority and its habitat conservation plan reserves
  • The Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority and the Santa Ana River Trail partners; the Riverside Corona Resource Conservation District
  • Southern California Edison; the Western Municipal Water District
  • The University of California, Riverside, its citrus collections and agricultural operations; California Baptist University grounds
  • Corona, Moreno Valley, Jurupa Valley, Norco, Lake Elsinore, Temecula and the other cities of the county
  • March Air Reserve Base's environmental program; the Cleveland and San Bernardino national forests

Getting there

From Medford

A flight into Ontario with the aircraft in its cases; eleven hours from Medford by road. Riverside and the Inland Empire sit between Los Angeles and San Diego on the southern trip.

The public lidar

What exists, and what it misses

Riverside County and the regional agencies have countywide lidar and the conservation authority maps its reserves from it. Habitat on a reserve parcel, fuels on a hillside neighbourhood, a river reach after a restoration project or the ground on a development site each want a current flight at the resolution of the question.

What we would fly

The lanes that fit Riverside

Infrared heat map over a lake and forest: heat perimeter, isolated heat points classed by temperature, and 50, 100, and 200 foot mopup buffers.
Wildland Fire
Post harvest assessment map for the Oregon Department of Forestry: downed woody debris volume by decay class in one acre cells, with species of standing trees.
Forestry
Orthomosaic of a creek corridor through Phoenix, Oregon, clipped to the project area.
Property
Three dimensional view of a farm elevation model with fields, tree mounds, and the pond in relief.
Farm Planning

Every service

Everything we do, in Riverside

  • Rivers, riparian and habitat Start here

    Species along a river corridor, wetlands and habitat, cold water seeps found with thermal, and baselines for restoration work.

  • Wildfire fuels and CWPP support Start here

    Canopy height, ladder fuels and structure exposure for a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, citywide when the plan needs it.

  • Property and site design Start here

    Design ready contours, tree points and surface models, in the formats and coordinate system the engineer specifies.

  • GIS consulting and data

    Hosted data, web maps and dashboards, Survey123 field apps, scripted reporting, and the cleanup of the data you already have.

  • Drone LiDAR

    Bare earth under the canopy, contours, surface and canopy height models, classified point clouds and line corridors, PPK controlled and checked.

  • Tree inventory and canopy

    Every crown in a city, a park system or a campus, with height, species and health, checked against trees on the ground.

  • Forestry

    Stand inventory, species and health classes, downed woody debris counted and measured from the air, post harvest monitoring.

  • Night infrared on active fires

    Heat perimeters and hotspots in the incident team’s hands before the morning briefing. The pipeline that builds the package runs at the UAS Wildland Fire Collaborative, the nonprofit we founded.

  • Farm planning

    Terrain, drainage low points, slope and sun, canopy, and plan overlays drawn on a current orthomosaic of the whole farm.

  • Multispectral imaging

    Five calibrated bands, vegetation indices, and species and health classification with its accuracy reported.

  • Thermal infrared

    A calibrated temperature in every pixel, flown as a mapping mission: fire heat classified in degrees, prescribed fire mortality, cold water seeps.

  • Federal and agency work

    Fire infrared, LiDAR on abandoned mine lands and forest data for federal land managers. Registered in SAM.gov.

Nearest work

Riverside County has no flight of ours yet. Standing in: habitat and bare earth at ten BLM mine sites, a river corridor classified by species, and a town's fuels data behind its wildfire plan.

Shaded relief of Harley Gulch from the drone LiDAR bare earth model, canyons and old workings in relief.

Property 2025

Ten abandoned mines, bare earth under the chaparral

Bat Conservation International, on Bureau of Land Management land, Ukiah Field Office

Bare earth, surface, and canopy height models over 779.4 acres of abandoned mine sites under steep chaparral, checked against the public LiDAR at 0.320 m RMSE.

Read the case
Riparian canopy polygons drawn as coloured outlines by dominant species over a true colour orthomosaic of a river corridor.

Forestry 2025

Riparian species and cold seeps on the Scott River

Cascade Stream Solutions, with a botanist leading field identification. We flew it as their subcontractor and reported to them.

Fourteen riparian species classified across 423 acres of river corridor, with thermal mapping that pointed to groundwater fed cold seeps.

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Ladder fuel classification in a LiDAR point cloud on a Medford demonstration property, with a ground photo of the stand inset.

Forestry 2024 to 2025

Citywide LiDAR for the Ashland CWPP

City of Ashland

Citywide drone LiDAR that gave the 2025 Ashland Community Wildfire Protection Plan its ladder fuel and structure exposure numbers.

Read the case

The record

Every project we have published

Forestry and trees

Rivers and habitat

Wildfire fuels and planning

Night infrared on fires

Terrain and site design

Farm planning

Riverside and the Inland Empire.

A reserve parcel, a river reach, a hillside neighbourhood or a site. Say which agency is asking and what its plan has to show, and the Inland Empire gets its days on the southern trip.

Talk to Eli

Email info@roguerecon.net or call 808 298 6290.