AeroGRID has signed agreements with two new partners, IGN, France (Institut Geographique National) and CNIG España adding full orthophoto coverage of France and Spain to its already impressive aerial photography coverage of Western Europe.

The Institut Geographique National (IGN, France) is the national mapping agency for France, with over 1,600 employees and a mandate to collect, integrate, manage and distribute reference geographical information for the whole country. IGN France has a year-on-year national update program for aerial photography and uses its fleet of aircraft to capture areas for public departments concerned with many scientific and environmental projects such as logging forest damage, flood and oil slick monitoring, surveys of archaeological sites and night flights to measure light pollution.

CNIG Spain is the commercial department for Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN-E, Spain). Founded in 1870, IGN-E is the national mapping agency, and, as part of the Ministry of Infrastructures and Transport, is responsible for the observation and maintenance of the national geodetic networks, producing and updating national cartography, producing and maintaining the Spanish Spatial Data Infrastructure and measuring and recording seismic and volcanic activity.

“AeroGRID is proud to be able to work with these two highly respected National Mapping Agencies and we are delighted to be able to add full online coverage of both France and Spain to our core datasets of Western Europe. This enables us to provide a continuous dataset of more than 1 million square miles (1.7 million km²) to our customers across the world” said Miles Taylor, General Manager. “Our role is to make all this imagery available to the multinational audience, thereby making the procurement of worldwide aerial imagery much more convenient and cost effective,” continued Taylor.

“IGN France is very satisfied by this agreement with AeroGRID, which will increase the wide dissemination and re-use of its national reference orthophoto collection and enable closer interoperability with IGN Spain,” said Patrice Parisé, General Director.

“CNIG Spain and IGN-E are glad of the cooperation with AeroGRID through this agreement, which is a good example of our data re-use policy for Spanish geographic information, in this case, national orthophoto coverage. These agreements together with IGN-E and IGN-F´s orthophoto data enable AeroGRID to provide a multinational offering and significant value add,” said Sebastian Mas, Director of CNIG.