Basic Feature Suggestion/Guidance

[Janet Hatfield]

Hi there- 

I want to start by saying thank you for making this possible.  It's very impressive, and much needed in this new world we find ourselves in.  One quick question and one suggestion. 

1) Is there a way to see the date associated with the satellite imagery basemap (similar to the Google Earth timeslider?)  We have a new beetle infestation here on the Inyo National Forest and it shows it well, but it's hard to know what timestamp we are looking at. 

  2) A quick and easy feature might be to add basic measuring tools (similar to ArcGIS Online or G.Earth ) so rapid analysis can take place on the fly. (polygon, line, point)

I hate to ask for more since you have already given so much, but for busy managers, these simple additions make this a go-to reference for everyday work and on the fly decision making. 

With gratitude and much respect.

[Christopher Anderson]

Hi Janet,

Thanks so much for your feedback! And our apologies for the delay in our response.

1) This is a good idea--I'll have to think through how to implement it. Currently we're just using a tile server, and there are multiple imagery sources from different time periods (NAIP, Landsat, etc.). So we don't have an easy way to query for the date of the imagery, because that changes by zoom level/region. I'll dig into this. But it should be pretty similar to the most recent imagery in Google Earth.

2) We're looking into adding this service to the system. Unfortunately it's a bigger lift than we'd anticipated since we built our system from scratch using open source tools (i.e., without an Arc/ESRI backend). The more we hear others requesting this same functionality, the higher up it will go on our list of priorities.

Thanks again, and please keep requesting features and functions. It helps us better understand community priorities.