How should we serve up the NAIP imagery in Pybossa?

[ezys]

Is the imagery already in Earth Engine/ some other platform? Or will we have to build our own WMS server?

[geowurster]

@ezys I have been told it is in EE, but have not used it. Will find out when I'm at the EE User Summit in https://github.com/SkyTruth/tasks/issues/403. How many counties in WV are we looking at?

If we can't use EE to serve the one of these companies may:

1. Mapbox generally tries to display the most up to date basemap + imagery, so they probably only have the most recent NAIP in their aerial basemap, but if they have all of it online, they may have a method for only loading tiles from a specific year.
2. I think CartoDB offers an imagery basemap but probably with the same constraints as above.
3. ESRI has a bunch of basemaps, but with the same constraints as above.
4. Some other hosted service. There's a whole industry built around selling this kind of product to local GIS offices, so I'm sure some company somewhere can do this for us. A bit of internet sleuthing would probably turn up a reputable one too.

Alternatively, we're not talking about a lot of imagery so if we get the imagery we can just pay Mapbox or CartoDB or ESRI to host it for us. If we really have to we can set up our own Mapserver instance, which is an open source WMS server. It's on us to implement any load balancing, caching, etc. that you get with hosted solutions so this will take a fair amount of human time, especially for styling, which is done through a mapfile. I think there's a QGIS plugin for translating QGIS style sheets to a Mapserver mapfile.

If we end up in a situation where we have to go find the data, I have heard it is available in a requester pays bucket on S3, but have not checked myself (don't have an AWS environment set up). mapbox/s3pay#1 suggests this is true, but may not be permanent. I think its the raw 16 bit GeoTIFF's (with NIR!) so the bandwidth fee may be kinda high, but I doubt its more expensive than the human time it would take to manually download everything from NRCS. The extra size may make it harder to mosaic though.