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Tag: Public Gardens

Blue Raster’s Recap from The American Public Gardens Association 2024 Conference

Last month, Blue Raster showcased its flourishing Public Garden practice at the American Public Gardens Associations Annual Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. It was the largest gathering in the conference's history, and the entire week was full of excitement, knowledge, and opportunities to connect with colleagues, both old and new.

Blue Raster split time between our booth in the expo and the presentations, where many of our partners spoke. At the booth, we shared our deep experience and passion for designing and developing custom interactive web and mobile mapping applications that highlight public garden collections, tours, and visitor amenities. Our partners, including The Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, Holden Forests & Gardens, and Cypress Lawn Arboretum presented on our collaboration using GIS and mapping to enhance not only the visitor experience but also internal workflows that allow for more efficient and dynamic plant records keeping. The entire conference was capped off with an evening at Mount Auburn Cemetery, with whom we collaborate on their Flora public web application.

Blue Raster has been supporting public gardens and cemeteries for 15 years and has been an APGA member since 2018. Having attended five in-person annual conferences, Christopher Gabris, Blue Raster’s Public Gardens Practice Lead, had this to say: “The prevalence of GIS and maps is growing at this conference every year. Blue Raster is proud to partner with gardens to develop well-designed and intuitive staff workflows and powerful web and mobile mapping applications for the public. Every garden is unique, and our dedicated team can bring your data and special story to life.”

Blue Raster is an Esri Gold Business Partner and offers something very special to gardens – the ability to design a tool for visitors that is as unique as the garden we work with. “We are not trying to put all our partners applications into a template that looks like everyone else’s or has restrictions on functionality. We will work with you to design and develop and application that meets the needs of your data, workflows, and your users,” says Gabris. “Our applications are designed to work on mobile devices, be styled to fit your gardens wider brand, and sync data between GIS and your database system of record.”

Learn more about how Blue Raster uses GIS to enhance public, staff, and research workflows at our partner gardens and reach out to see how we could help you: https://www.blueraster.com/what-we-do/modernize-public-gardens/

 

Blue Raster Takes to the Skies at Holden Forests & Gardens

On a beautiful April morning in Northeast Ohio, Blue Raster made final preparations for a drone basemap capture. Located in Kirtland, about 30 minutes East of Downtown Cleveland, is the sprawling 3,600-acre Holden Arboretum, one of the largest public gardens in the county. With over 20,000 annual member households and an annual attendance of over 350,000 visitors, people flock to see the beauty of the different landscapes in search of inspiration, education, and peace.

On this day, Blue Raster was tasked to capture approximately 300 acres of the curated collections and gardens (the rest being mostly natural lands) with a drone to create a high-resolution basemap for use by staff and in a future public application. After a brisk morning drive in the golf cart to review the locations of the preset ground control points, the drone was ready to fly.

Blue Raster’s Associate Project Manager and Drone Pilot, Ben Masters, explained to the Holden Team along for the ride how the drone would capture the images, the planned flight paths, altitude, and speed, and provided a safety moment. In four separate planned missions, over 1,400 images were captured in a matter of hours. Then it was off to the Cleveland Botanical Garden, the second institution in the Holden Forests & Gardens family, to capture the approximately 10 acres located in Cleveland’s University Circle neighborhood.

Combined, the five drone missions and over 1,700 images captured were processed for the two sites using Esri’s ArcGIS Drone2Map software. The high-resolution and current imagery allows for accurate GIS and mapping workflows. Over the next few weeks, Blue Raster will prepare the basemap for use in Holden’s ArcGIS Enterprise environment. Everything from workflows in ArcGIS Field Maps to the future public application will utilize this basemap. Holden Forests and Gardens has nearly 20,000 individual living plant records in their botanical repository, BG-BASE, which will be synced with GIS for real-time display of location, condition, measurements, and more in GIS.

Want to learn more about Blue Raster’s drone and Public Gardens capabilities and experience? We've supported over a dozen Public Gardens since 2010. Check out our website and reach out!

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