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Yakima, Washington

Apples, hops and the forest the Nation manages, with fire in the canyons.

The Yakima Valley grows more apples and hops than anywhere in the country and the Yakama Nation manages one of the largest tribal forests in the West above it. The Schneider Springs fire burned the Naches canyons in 2021. Orchard planning, forest inventory and fuels are the flights that fit.

Talk to Eli All of Washington

The ground

Yakima and Yakima County

The Yakima River comes out of the Cascades through Union Gap and the valley opens into orchards, hop yards and vineyards all the way to the Tri Cities, irrigated from canals that have run for a century. West and north the dry side forest climbs toward White Pass and Chinook Pass through the Naches and Tieton canyons; south west the Yakama reservation holds forest, range and the east side of Mount Adams. Cowiche Canyon and the Wenas hills frame the city on the north side.

Who buys mapping here

  • City of Yakima: Parks and Recreation, Public Works, Planning; Union Gap, Selah, Sunnyside, Toppenish
  • Yakima County: Emergency Management, Public Services, the county GIS
  • The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation: forestry, fisheries and natural resources programs
  • Washington State Department of Natural Resources, Southeast Region, and the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest's Naches district
  • North Yakima Conservation District, the Yakima Basin Fish and Wildlife Recovery Board, the Cowiche Canyon Conservancy
  • Pacific Power and the valley irrigation districts
  • The Yakima Training Center and the Yakima Valley fire districts
  • Orchardists, hop growers, vineyards and the packing houses planning blocks and water

Getting there

From Medford

About seven hours from Medford across the Cascades by Interstate 5 and Highway 12, or a flight to Yakima or Seattle. Yakima anchors an eastern Washington trip with the Tri Cities.

The public lidar

What exists, and what it misses

Yakima County has partial state portal coverage, better on the valley floor than in the forest, and the Nation and the agencies hold their own data for parts of the reservation and the national forest. An orchard block, a hop yard, a treated forest unit or a burned canyon slope each want a current flight at the resolution of a single row or a single tree.

What we would fly

The lanes that fit Yakima

Three dimensional view of a farm elevation model with fields, tree mounds, and the pond in relief.
Farm Planning
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

Every service

Everything we do, in Yakima

  • Farm planning Start here

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

  • Forestry Start here

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Rivers, riparian and habitat

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

  • 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.

  • 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

We have yet to fly the Yakima Valley. Comparable work: the Talent nursery plan, an ODF timber sale unit assessed after harvest, and a fire flown eleven nights running.

Three dimensional overview of the farm elevation model draped over the landscape.

Farm Planning 2023

A farm plan on real ground

Plant Oregon with Oregon Urban Rural and Community Forestry, a tree nursery in development

Terrain, ponds, tree mounds, and a site plan drawn on a current ortho of the whole farm.

Read the case
Oblique aerial view of a post harvest unit in the Oregon Coast Range: cut ground with slash, standing timber on the ridge behind.

Forestry 2023

Post harvest monitoring for ODF

Oregon Department of Forestry

The 2023 ODF unit on video and in a StoryMap, with how the LiDAR, multispectral, and RGB products were built.

Read the case
Night infrared of the Fielder Mountain fire on its first night, more than a thousand separate heat sources glowing across dark burned ground.

Wildland Fire 2026

Fielder Mountain, eleven nights as the heat went out

Oregon Department of Forestry

Eleven nights of infrared on one steep fire in August 2026. The heat sources on the map fell from 2,852 on the first night to 58 on the last.

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

Yakima: the block, the stand, the canyon.

An orchard or hop yard to plan, a forest unit to inventory, or a canyon to map after the fire. Tell us where and when and we will build the eastern trip around it.

Talk to Eli

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