Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

Wooding Geospatial Solutions (WGS), an ISO-certified aerial survey and mapping company with offices in South Africa, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, provides Geographical Information Systems (GIS) services that turn geospatial data into maps and analysis for its clients.

The service covers professional, web and thematic map creation; field data collection, data integration and data maintenance; spatial analysis such as buffer analysis, overlay analysis and spatial statistics for site selection, environmental impact assessments and infrastructure planning; dashboards and 3D visualisations, including 3D urban models; custom GIS development; and GIS training, typically in QGIS or Global Mapper. Most inputs come from WGS's own aerial imagery and LiDAR, captured with large-format mapping cameras on manned aircraft, and results are delivered in GIS formats such as Shapefile, GeoTIFF, KML/KMZ and DEM/DTM files.

Satellite data enters through WGS's remote-sensing work on change detection and object detection. In a sugar crop area audit covering Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambique, WGS used freely available Sentinel-2 imagery with existing field polygons, calculating an average crop health indicator per field each week when cloud-free data was available. Comparing each week with the last let WGS monitor hundreds of square kilometres of cropland and confirm harvested fields, often within a week of harvest. Other GIS work shown includes 2D and 3D building footprints and town mapping for small communities in Alberta, Canada.