Some of the most valuable lessons in geospatial technology come from projects that don’t fit a standard mold. This session brings together a series of case studies from unusual environments and unconventional approaches, showing how practitioners are adapting tools and workflows to meet challenges that routine methods can’t easily solve. From hazardous terrain and fast-changing landscapes to disaster recovery and complex infrastructure, each presentation offers a close look at what it takes to get reliable data when conditions are far from ideal.
Presenters will share the problems they faced, the strategies they chose, and the results they achieved, including what worked, what didn’t, and what they would do differently. Whether the story involves emerging sensors, innovative field methods, or creative data collection in data-scarce settings, the focus is on practical, transferable takeaways attendees can apply to their own work.
This session will include the following presentations:
A Case Study on the Application of Pocket Lidar Technology for 3D Tunnel Modeling and Inspection
Presented by Ezra Che and Michael Olsen, EZDATAMD LLC, and Matthew Corrigan, Federal Highway Administration
Mobile devices (e.g., smart phones, tablets) equipped with lidar sensor along with rapidly evolving apps have significantly lowered the cost, operational complexity, and required processing expertise for 3D mapping and modeling. In this work, as part of a Federal Highway Adminstration (FHWA) research project, “Leveraging Handhled ‘Pocket Lidar’ for Digital Construction Inspection and As-Builts”, the research team led by EZDATAMD LLC conducted a case study with Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). This study assessed the feasibility and performance of utilizing a pocket lidar device (e.g., Apple iPhone 17 Pro) in 3D tunnel modeling and inspection. The project team tested multiple apps and evaluated the results both qualitatively and quantitatively, comparing them against survey-grade terrestrial laser scanning data. This presentation will highlight the key findings and facilitate a general discussion on the best practices and use cases of utilizing pocket lidar device in various engineering and construction applications.
Rapid Reality Capture for Post-Wildfire Recovery
Presented by Chris Gilling, McElhanney
Following the 2024 wildfire that destroyed approximately 300 homes and businesses in Jasper, Alberta, Parks Canada engaged McElhanney to restore property-boundary monuments throughout affected areas of the community. The work included densely developed portions of downtown Jasper, where buildings were constructed directly along or near property lines.An important part of the boundary-restoration process was verifying how calculated property boundaries compared with existing lines of occupation, including building walls and corners. Documenting every relevant feature through conventional ground surveying and individual photography was expected to require several days of detailed fieldwork.
McElhanney used the Looq Platform to capture four downtown areas in approximately four hours, including GPS surveying of ground-control points for alignment. Each individual area was captured in less than 15 minutes, and alignment required approximately 20 minutes per area.The resulting high-resolution, georeferenced point clouds enabled the team to extract building footprints and compare them efficiently with calculated property boundaries. The platform’s panoramic imagery and 3D visualization also created a detailed digital record that could be revisited when specific locations required closer assessment, supporting collaboration and reducing the need for additional site visits.
McElhanney will lead this practical case study, outlining the surveying challenge, field strategy, control workflow, and use of the resulting data during property-boundary calculations. A Looq technical representative will contribute technical context on capture planning, processing, alignment, quality control, and how handheld photogrammetry can complement conventional surveying and other reality-capture methods.The session will share practical lessons for surveyors and geospatial professionals working in post-disaster and time-sensitive environments where access, accuracy, field efficiency, and comprehensive site documentation are critical.
Geospatial Approaches to Africa’s Informal Transit Networks
Presented by Praise Adegoju, Transeat
Across African megacities, the majority of daily trips run on informal transit systems, minibuses, shared taxis, and motorcycle taxis, that operate on routes with no fixed schedule, no official map, and often no named road to anchor a stop to. Standard mapping and routing approaches, built for cities with structured, static transit data, largely fail here.
This session examines the specific geospatial challenges of mapping highly fluid, informally-operated transit networks: route instability that outpaces static data collection, the absence of consistent street naming and addressing, and the mismatch between formal data standards like GTFS and the lived, landmark-based way residents actually navigate. Drawing on prior mapping efforts across African cities and firsthand work building a geospatial data collection approach for Lagos, Nigeria, this talk covers practical methodologies for capturing transit geography in data-scarce, rapidly-changing urban environments, including crowdsourced and narrative-based data collection techniques, and what it takes to keep a transit dataset accurate when the ground truth itself won’t hold still.
