What Is It Used For

Aerial surveys and remote sensing techniques can be applied to many different applications.  Often aerial surveys offer county assessors, city planners, developer, engineers and others a way to look at a high quality, high resolution photo to be able to make informed decisions.  This can also be used by industries such as forestry to track changes in tree growth, or animal migrations.  There are even ways through remote sensing that a soil analysis can be conducted, ways to map archeological sites or find illicit drugs such as the example in the link for the article Hidden Villa marijuana raid nets 32,000 plants.  My favorite use is definetely aerial survey, just for the fact that surveying is one of the oldest professions known to man, and just by the fact that we live in a beautiful world.  For a more in depth look at this topic, click the link below.

http://www.schoolsintheusa.com/careerprofiles_details.cfm?carid=334

How are Aerial Surveys Gathered?

There are many ways to gather aerial surveys and historically in the past, even pigeons have been used.  Typically aerial surveys are gathered through the use of an aircraft such as the one shown (operated by Keystone Aerial Surveys Inc.) in the picture in this post.  You will notice it is necessary to cut a hole in the aircraft to mount the camera.  This type of platform will give you high resolution photos, which can be used in many various applications.  These applications include everything from engineering to forestry and even more.

For a more detailed explanation check out the article called "Remote Sensing Survey Strategy" at  http://www.searchmesh.net/default.aspx?page=1726.