A project to remap Alaska reaches its halfway point

An effort to remap Alaska celebrated its half-way mark Tuesday during a ‘skybreaking’ ceremony in Anchorage. The remapping initiative is a significant undertaking for the state. Alaska is 57 percent mapped. That’s the milestone celebrated today at the FedEx hangar in Anchorage. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell gave the keynote by telecast, and a handful of GIS big-wigs flew in for the event. Nick Mastrodicasa with the Department of Transportation is one of the project’s leaders in Alaska: “When this whole thing started in 2006 — it’s been 10 years almost — I found out that Mars was better mapped, and more recently mapped and more accurately mapped, than Alaska,” Mastrodicasa says. A lot of the current mapping data used in Alaska is 40 to 50 years old. It was collected using manual cartography techniques that are now obsolete. One of the big drawbacks of that old data is that it isn’t always accurate. Forty-one million dollars have been spent on the project so far, and that money is coming from a multitude of different state and federal agencies...more