April 25, 2012 -- Premier Geospatial, Inc. – a leading provider of aerial imagery, remote sensing data, land information, and GIS services – has been contracted to provide custom orthophotography coverage for twelve Areas of Interest throughout northern Idaho and eastern Washington, in order to provide Avista Utilities with high-resolution imagery for 492 square miles.  The project will consist of 440 square miles of 6-inch pixel resolution imagery and 52 square miles of 1-foot pixel resolution imagery, to be collected in the late spring to early summer of 2012. 

To perform Avista’s aerial photography acquisition flight mission, PremierGeo will use a twin engine aircraft equipped with a Leica ADS40 (SH51) sensor, which captures pan-chromatic (black and white), color (RGB), and color near-infrared (CIR) image data simultaneously to deliver a four-band final product.  Four-band imagery provides a flexible dataset that can be used in a variety of applications, including change detection, vegetation analysis, land use/land cover, impervious/pervious mapping, disturbance analysis, planimetric feature extraction, and more.

PremierGeo’s Peter Briere, General Manager, said of the announcement: “Our staff has a history of proven success working with Avista, and we look forward to providing high-resolution imagery to support their mission to provide customers with safe, reliable, service.”

Previously, PremierGeo (formerly Pixxures) successfully provided Avista with orthophotography services from 2001-2006.

About Premier Geospatial

PremierGeo provides geospatial services to clients, including digital aerial imagery acquisition, orthophotography, LiDAR data acquisition and processing, remote sensing analysis, professional land surveying, historical imagery conversion and processing, and photogrammetric film scanning.  Premier Data provides diverse data management services and products including land records management, GIS application development, data entry, and microfiche and aperture card scanning.

To learn more about Premier Geospatial, Inc. please visit us at: www.premiergeospatial.com

About Avista Utilities

Avista Utilities is involved in the production, transmission and distribution of energy. We provide energy services and electricity to 360,000 customers and natural gas to 321,000 customers in a service territory that covers 30,000 square miles in eastern Washington, northern Idaho and parts of southern and eastern Oregon, with a population of 1.5 million.  Avista Utilities is an operating division of Avista Corp. (NYSE: AVA).

For more information, please visit www.avistautilities.com.