3 Ways AEC Firms Can Get the Most Out of ArcGIS Living Atlas

Project resources for AECs and Environmental Consulting organizations to unlock the full potential of ArcGIS Living Atlas

Jennie Byron and Brett Heist

 Originally published: March 2, 2024 | Last updated: February 14, 2025 

Introduction

 ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World  is a collection of authoritative geographic information from around the world, curated by Esri and its partners. These layers provide valuable data on various geographic phenoma such as land cover, vegetation, hydrology, soil types, and more. You can use this data to enhance your Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) and Environmental consulting project workflows and empower your users, both GIS and CAD, with direct access to the data and tools they need to draw insights that create actionable opportunities for your organization. But AEC and Environmental consulting firms are busy and always on the go, so it can be hard to find the time to explore the vastness of the Living Atlas and identify what content really lends itself to providing value to the work you're doing. In this StoryMap, we'll highlight resources we see as being valuable to AEC and Environmental consulting firms and the specific workflows they perform.

  If you're looking for other ways to leverage ArcGIS Living Atlas, visit this  blog , "Ten ways to get the most out of ArcGIS Living Atlas".  

For AEC and Environmental consulting professionals, the Living Atlas can be used to analyze and understand the geographic context of a project site. For example, the  National Land Cover Database (NCLD) land cover  layer can provide insights into the existing vegetation and land use patterns, allowing architects and engineers to design structures that are in harmony with the surrounding environment. The  National Hydrography Dataset hydrology  layer delineates the rivers and waterbodies for an area which becomes a richer story when shown with the  NLCD impervious surfaces  and flood-prone areas from the  FEMA USA Flood Hazard  layer. These layers together can support the design and construction of resilient and sustainable drainage systems for infrastructure projects.

At a proposal stage or pre-planning desktop analysis, AECs and Environmental consulting firms can leverage the Living Atlas data to layer information for a rich and insightful understanding of a project site before field crews are deployed to conduct environmental assessments and impact studies. These layers provide up-to-date and accurate information on various environmental parameters, allowing consultants to analyze the potential impacts of a project on the surrounding ecosystem. This can include assessing the  impact on wildlife habitats ,  wetland environments ,  water resources , and  sensitive ecological areas . By incorporating this data into their analysis, AECs and Environmental consultants can provide more informed recommendations and mitigate potential environmental risks which are carried throughout the design, construction, and OM&M phases of a project.

Overall, Esri's Living Atlas layers offer a wealth of geospatial data that can enhance decision-making processes throughout the lifecycle of their projects and make more sustainable and environmentally conscious choices in the AEC and Environmental consulting industries.

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Key Benefits

 

Save time

Explore maps, apps, and data layers from Esri and thousands of other organizations, all in one place!

Data Confidence

Esri partners with top agencies like  NOAA ,  USGS ,  FEMA ,  USFW  (US Fish and Wildlife), and many others to bring you up-to-date, authoritative data that you can trust

 

 

Versatile project use, whether it's for Architecture, Design, Engineering, Construction, or Environmental Consulting

Living Atlas maps, apps, and data layers provide geographic context for many project scenarios. From prebuilt apps that let you  explore imagery  for an area over time, to authoritative data layers that can contribute to  wetland delineations , the Living Atlas has resources to help support your project needs

Save time in early stages of the project, whether that's ground truthing, site selection, desktop planning, or customizing multi-discipline project team sites in planning and permitting phases of project work

Create sustainable, repeatable, and adaptable workflows over and over by using these Esri maintained layers, apps, and deep learning packages on the many different projects that an AEC will encounter.

Use on public or internal Hub sites

Share the love of data! Living Atlas content is publicly available and a great resource for enhancing your already amazing Hub sites, whether you're collaborating internally or participating in public stakeholder engagement.

Enhance your CAD designs

The  ArcGIS for AutoCAD plugin , provides seamless integration between GIS and CAD workflows allowing for smoother collaboration and data exchange. Whether it's accessing detailed terrain information, environmental data, or infrastructure networks, leveraging Living Atlas within ArcGIS for AutoCAD empowers AEC firms to streamline processes, improve accuracy, and ultimately deliver more robust and successful projects.

AI Jumpstart

 Pretrained Deep Learning Models  eliminate the need for huge volumes of training data, massive computing resources, and extensive artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge. They save you time from building a custom model from scratch and allow you to focus on extracting or identifying features from your project site to start designing sooner!

Next we'll go over the three big ways AEC and Environmental Consulting organizations can leverage the Living Atlas content we love most (with links!), and a bit more information about how they can be used in your day-to-day operations to support project deliverables.

1. Ready-to-Use Apps

Content from ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World is used to make stunning, valuable apps for visualization and analysis. These are a great way to explore different datasets, download data, or extract layers for other workflows and to get inspired by what can be created with the many layers contained within the Living Atlas. Some of these apps may become your go-to for certain project needs.

Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer

  •  World Imagery Wayback  - This app offers a dynamic Wayback browsing and discovery experience where previous versions of the World Imagery basemap are presented within the map, along a timeline, and as a list
  •  ArcGIS Vector Tile Style Editor  -  ArcGIS Vector Tile Style Editor is a tool to give you a fast and easy way to create a custom vector basemap style that matches your brand and the type of app that you are building
  •  Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer  - Annual 10-meter global land use/land cover maps presented in a ready to use web application for dynamic visual and statistical change analysis
  •  EcoExplorer  - Explore the terrestrial ecosystem through the World Ecophysiography Map
  •  Air Quality Aware  - The Air Quality Aware app is intended to provide information about the current conditions of air quality in the United States, along with the potential human health impacts

Landsat Explorer

  •  Landsat Explorer  - A custom web application for visualizing and analyzing Landsat imagery
  •  Search Living Atlas Imagery Mosaics  - A custom add-in by Loxodrome Labs that allows working with Esri's Living Atlas Imagery mosaics. Query a point for historical imagery, analyze by date, and load it directly into the map document.
  •  SSURGO Downloader  - This application provides quick access to ready-to-use project packages filled with useful soil data derived from the SSURGO dataset

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2. Enhance Workflows with Authoritative Data

From initial planning and design to site characterization and downstream operational awareness, the authoritative data sets available through Living Atlas offer invaluable insights and context.

Risk mitigation from start to finish and beyond of a project is important and whether your project is small or large, Living Atlas is a scalable source of information that you can use to evaluate and mitigate risk with confidence.

The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) stage of a project helps to identify potential risk to the environment and surrounding community in the short and long term.

Based on these EIA findings, a plan of action is put in place for the project to mitigate the risk with an aim to minimize impact to the project site and surrounding areas as much as possible. Living Atlas can support these initial environmental assessments through layering information, such as  USA Forest Type ,  Critical Habitat for Threatened and Endangered Species ,  Intact Habitat Cores (2023) , and  USA Federal Lands .

Another common AEC workflow is to assess risk to infrastructure and assets. Through a  suitability analysis exercise  using information such as geology, slope, earthquakes, and flood risk zones, Living Atlas layers can help to delineate potential areas of risk. This enables AECs to provide suggestions for enhanced support or alternate routing with the aim to reduce financial impact in the future.

AEC projects use various sources of data, whether that's design drawings from architects, existing site conditions from a surveyor, field collected data, or construction design drawings, there's a need for interoperability. The  ArcGIS for AutoCAD plugin , provides a rich integration between GIS and CAD for more effective collaboration.

Whether it's accessing detailed terrain information, environmental data, or infrastructure networks, leveraging Living Atlas within ArcGIS for AutoCAD empowers AEC firms to connect to GIS project content within the CAD environment to foster collaboration, use location to geoenable teams, and ultimately deliver more robust and successful projects.

Access live feeds!

Live feeds are geospatial data sets that are captured in real-time (weather, streaming). ArcGIS Living Atlas includes authoritative live feeds that helps you monitor and learn more about current and predicted conditions. These cover a broad range of topics such as earthquakes, wildfires, weather, thermal hotspots, stream gauges, and more. When managing field efforts, Project Managers can evaluate potential hazards with Living Atlas live feeds to keep field teams safe and help mitigate unexpected project delays.

Here are direct links to a few Living Atlas live feeds:

Additional Feeds:

3. AI and Deep Learning Models

 

Pretrained Deep Learning Models eliminate the need for huge volumes of training data, massive computing resources, and extensive  Artificial Intelligence (AI)  knowledge. Accelerate your geospatial workflows with built-in expertise and resources designed specifically for image feature extraction, land-cover classification, image redaction, and detecting objects. Automate the way you extract meaningful insights from imagery, point clouds, and video.

 

Getting Started with Pretrained Models  

Pretrained deep learning models can instantly recognize complex shapes, patterns, and textures at various scales within images, point clouds, or video. This means that you can off-load tedious tasks of digitizing and extracting geographical features, such as roads, solar panels, and building footprints, with ease. Find all the current packages available here:  Pre-trained Deep Learning Packages 

 

 

 

Deep learning capabilities are available in ArcGIS Pro, for use with imagery and point clouds, through several tools and capabilities. But before we are able to leverage any of these capabilities we'll first need to prepare our Pro environment.

Visit the  Install Deep Learning frameworks  GitHub page for more information.

Do you have ArcGIS Enterprise and want to leverage deep learning? Learn how to  configure ArcGIS Imagery Server for deep learning raster analytics  on your Enterprise environment.

Interested in a sneak peek? Take a look at these Deep Learning packages in action with the  Pretrained AI Models StoryMap .

There are also ways to refine these pre-trained models to work with features common to your geography. See the following articles for other ways to work with these models.

 Additional Resources:

Check out the ' AEC in 5 Minutes ' video series that includes this video on " GeoAI for Asset Identification and Extraction ". This video will show how you can get started leveraging Esri's pre-trained deep learning models to accelerate feature extraction workflows and automatically detect and extract features from aerial and drone imagery.

Living Atlas gives you that advantage for all your AEC project workflows, by saving you time searching for project data, jumpstarting your data analysis through deep learning packages, and helps interpret complex information through apps by providing a common visual language. Living Atlas can be adapted towards the wide spectrum of AEC projects you'll encounter, allowing you to focus on the things that matter most to deliver your projects successfully.

Curated AEC Links

Living Atlas layers to explore!

There is a  group of layers for landscape analysis  that are configurable and provide access to hundreds of measures about aspects of the people, natural systems, and plant/animals that define the landscape of the United States and the rest of the world. Esri has taken best available data from many public data sources and provided the content in an easy to use GIS consumable collection of datasets.

The below layers are a small subset of the overall group of landscape analysis layers and other Living Atlas layers that can support your environmental planning, design approach, construction management, and ongoing operations on AEC and Environmental consulting projects. Let us know what other layers you find helpful in our  Esri community post  or by emailing us at aecinfo@esri.com.

About Esri

Esri is the global market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping. Since 1969, we have supported customers with geographic science and geospatial analytics, what we call The Science of Where. We take a geographic approach to problem-solving, brought to life by modern GIS technology. We are committed to using science and technology to build a sustainable world.   Learn more about the company. 

Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer

Landsat Explorer