Maintenance responsibility for more than 25,000 miles of navigation channels and 400 ports and harbors throughout the United States requires extensive surveying and mapping services, including boundary, topographic, hydrographic, terrestrial lidar, and multispectral and hyperspectral aerial imagery collection as well as airborne topographic and bathymetric lidar acquisition, project-level GIS implementation, development of file-based geodatabases, and GIS tool development.
Three representative survey and mapping datasets include the National Channel Framework (NCF)—an enterprise geodatabase of information on all 61 USACE-maintained high-tonnage channels —hydrographic surveys, which provide assistance in locating navigable channels, determining dredging requirements, verifying dredging accuracy, and maintaining harbors and rivers —and Inland Electronic Navigational Charts(IENC), accurate navigational charts provided in a highly structured data format for use in navigation systems and to increase overall navigational safety..