WILMINGTON — Clinton County has signed an annual contract with Woolpert for a subscription software service that hosts, maintains and facilitates access to geospatial imagery in the cloud.

The county owns large volumes of high-quality orthoimagery for use by the public and local, state and federal agencies.

“Most counties map between every year and every three years to support their planning, engineering and land management data needs,” Woolpert Vice President and Geospatial Program Director Brian Stevens said. “Due to the sheer size and expanding applications of geospatial imagery, storing, managing and distributing this data has become a major challenge for many counties and municipalities.”

Clinton County has accumulated layers of geospatial data, including large imagery data sets, since initiating GIS operations in the 1990s.

Stevens, who has worked with Clinton County for more than 20 years, said that Clinton County Engineer Jeff Linkous was instrumental in the county’s early adoption of GIS. He said that support has continued to benefit the county as technology has advanced and geospatial applications have grown.

Clinton County GIS Manager Joe Merritt said the size and storage of the county’s imagery base mapping data was becoming counterproductive. He said accessibility constraints were limiting use by county offices and the general public, thus reducing the data’s usefulness and compromising years of investment.

“We have imagery from 20 years ago that we couldn’t access effectively,” Merritt said. “This subscription service provides an easy, ready and cost-effective solution to a problem that has literally been building for years. With this service, we’ll have access to this data across the county without worrying about future costs in software, storage or IT staffing.”