Kansas City, Missouri

The boulevards, the Blue River, and the lines running out to the farms.

Kansas City built one of the great park and boulevard systems and keeps a canopy program to go with it. Around the metro are the electric cooperatives, the hardwood bottoms along the Missouri and the Blue, and the row crop ground we wrote the Missouri page for. Canopy inventory, corridor LiDAR and farm terrain are the flights.

Talk to Eli All of Missouri

The ground

Kansas City and Jackson County and Clay County and Platte County

The city spreads along the south bank of the Missouri where the Kansas River joins it, from the river bluffs and the West Bottoms up through the boulevards to the oak and hickory of Swope Park and the Blue River valley. North of the river Clay and Platte counties run from the suburbs out to farms and the airport; east and south the metro gives way to pasture, corn and beans and the wooded creek bottoms between them. Summer storms, ice and the emerald ash borer, here for over a decade, are what the trees contend with.

Who buys mapping here

City of Kansas City: Parks and Recreation and its forestry division, Water Services, Public Works, the GIS group
Jackson County Parks and Recreation, Clay County and Platte County
The electric cooperatives around the metro and Evergy's corridors
The Mid America Regional Council, which holds the regional GIS
Heartland Tree Alliance and the canopy programs; Bridging The Gap
The Missouri Department of Conservation's Kansas City region and the state parks along the river
Independence, Lee's Summit, Blue Springs, Liberty and the other metro cities
Row crop and cattle operations in the counties east and north, and the engineers building on the bluffs

Getting there

From Medford

Kansas City is a flight from the West Coast with the aircraft checked as freight and a rental truck at the other end. We plan Missouri as a two week trip and route it through the cities that have work.

The public lidar

What exists, and what it misses

Missouri has statewide lidar through the state's spatial data service and the federal 3DEP program, and the metro has been flown more than once for floodplain work. It is terrain data at terrain dates. A tree by tree canopy inventory for the parks department, a corridor's clearance for a cooperative or a field's drainage after a wet spring each need a current flight at their own resolution.

What we would fly

The lanes that fit Kansas City

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

Tree inventory and canopy Start here
Every crown in a city, a park system or a campus, with height, species and health, checked against trees on the ground.
Drone LiDAR Start here
Bare earth under the canopy, contours, surface and canopy height models, classified point clouds and line corridors, PPK controlled and checked.
Farm planning Start here
Terrain, drainage low points, slope and sun, canopy, and plan overlays drawn on a current orthomosaic of the whole farm.
GIS consulting and data
Hosted data, web maps and dashboards, Survey123 field apps, scripted reporting, and the cleanup of the data you already have.
Forestry
Stand inventory, species and health classes, downed woody debris counted and measured from the air, post harvest monitoring.
Rivers, riparian and habitat
Species along a river corridor, wetlands and habitat, cold water seeps found with thermal, and baselines for restoration work.
Property and site design
Design ready contours, tree points and surface models, in the formats and coordinate system the engineer specifies.
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, for cold water seeps and the heat differences a river corridor shows.
Federal and agency work
LiDAR on abandoned mine lands and forest data for federal land managers. Registered in SAM.gov.

Nearest work

We have not flown in Missouri. Three Oregon jobs show what the Kansas City work would look like: a city counted crown by crown, a corridor measured tree by tree, and a farm planned on drone LiDAR terrain.

Crown polygons and treetops over the canopy height model and orthomosaic in Eugene.

Forestry 2025 to 2026

Finding every Oregon ash before the borer does

City of Eugene, Parks and Open Space

12,632 crowns classified across 390 acres of riparian canopy. 5,261 of them Oregon ash.

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Overview of the Bear Creek corridor through Phoenix from the June 2025 LiDAR: the greenway, the creek, and the highway with the young planting in place.

Property 2025

A planting corridor through Phoenix, tree by tree

City of Phoenix

The year one record for 98 trees the city planted where the Almeda fire burned through Phoenix, from drone LiDAR and RGB flown 65 days after planting.

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