Rogue Reconnaissance
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Tacoma, Washington

Old growth in a city park, a watershed the city owns, prairie the Army burns.

Pierce County has forest questions at every scale: a seven hundred acre old growth park on a peninsula, a utility that manages a mountain watershed for drinking water, a military base that keeps the last Puget prairie with prescribed fire, and a river that drains the biggest volcano in the lower forty eight.

Talk to Eli All of Washington

The ground

Tacoma and Pierce County

Tacoma sits on Commencement Bay where the Puyallup River reaches the Sound, with Point Defiance Park and its old growth Douglas fir at the end of the peninsula and the port on the tideflats. South and east the county is Joint Base Lewis McChord's prairies and oak, then farms and towns up the Puyallup and Carbon valleys toward Mount Rainier. Tacoma's water comes off the Green River watershed, closed forest the utility manages, and its power from dams on the Nisqually and the Cowlitz.

Who buys mapping here

  • City of Tacoma: Environmental Services, the urban forestry program, Public Works, the GIS group
  • Metro Parks Tacoma and Point Defiance Park
  • Tacoma Public Utilities: Tacoma Water and the Green River watershed, Tacoma Power and its corridors
  • Pierce County: Surface Water Management, Parks and Recreation, Emergency Management, Planning
  • Joint Base Lewis McChord's environmental and forestry programs and the Center for Natural Lands Management prairie work
  • The Puyallup Tribe and the Nisqually Tribe and their natural resources departments
  • Pierce Conservation District, Nisqually Land Trust, Forterra
  • The Port of Tacoma; Puyallup, Lakewood, University Place, Gig Harbor and the other county cities
  • Mount Rainier National Park's gateway communities and the timber lands below the park

Getting there

From Medford

Tacoma is about seven hours from Medford by road, or a flight to SeaTac and a half hour south. It shares a trip with Seattle and Olympia.

The public lidar

What exists, and what it misses

Pierce County has countywide lidar through the state portal and the county's own surface water program uses it well. A park forest's tree list, a watershed stand's health, a prairie restoration baseline or a riverside parcel's current ground are each a drone flight: the public data has the terrain, not this year's crowns.

What we would fly

The lanes that fit Tacoma

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
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
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 Tacoma

  • Forestry Start here

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Wildfire fuels and CWPP support

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

  • 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.

  • 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: 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

Pierce County is not on the map yet. The work that shows what we would do here: thirty thousand Douglas fir crowns classed by health, a city tree inventory, and a restoration corridor counted in its first year.

Douglas fir crowns colored by health class over the Ashland watershed orthomosaic.

Forestry 2023 to 2024

At risk, declining, dieback, dead

City of Ashland

About 30,000 Douglas fir crowns classed by health across the city's watershed lands, so the city could see the die off and act on it.

Read the case
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.

Read the case
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.

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

Tacoma and Pierce County, on the Puget Sound trip.

The park, the watershed, the prairie or the river: name the ground and the question and we will plan it with the Seattle week.

Talk to Eli

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