Metro Vancouver Regional Parks

2018 – 2021 | Lower Mainland, BC

Metro Vancouver Parks consists of 33 regional parks and greenways containing over 150,000 meters of linear assets including fences, waterlines, electrical wires, gas lines, and over 7,000-point assets such as water utilities, furniture, electrical equipment, and signs. Metro Vancouver Regional District requested an updated spatial database of all assets owned and maintained by the parks department. Areas with dense canopy and tree cover interfered with GPS signal making it challenging to collect high accuracy in areas. Some features were located in confined locations or in thick forested areas that were difficult to access. McElhanney provided a combination of technical solutions to overcome these GPS challenges with LiDAR, Orthophoto and GPS.

McElhanney designed and implemented a mobile field program and desktop conversion of various data sources from new collection to historic paper drawings, PDFs, GIS and CAD. Using high precision GPS and mobile devices designed for asset collection, our GIS technicians visited each park to locate, collect, attribute, photograph and assess each asset.

This project allowed Metro Vancouver Parks to be able to amalgamate multiple historic datasets, as well as collect and assess their assets in the field to build a new GIS asset management record to implement in future asset management programs. It also allowed all the data to be accessible in one place of record – a secure web-enabled GIS.

McElhanney provided:

• A web-interface (Vertisee) to aid in quality control and project updates live from the field
• Development and management of extensive GIS inventory
• In-field data collection of assets
• Provide detailed assessments, asset information, and replacement costs, accompanied with photos in ESRI Geodatabase format