Ecopia AI Delivers Impervious Surface Data to City of Billings for Stormwater Management

February 21, 2024 -- Toronto -- Today, Ecopia AI (Ecopia) announces the delivery of high-precision impervious surface mapping data to the City of Billings, Montana to support equitable stormwater utility fee (SUF) calculation. This comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date dataset will enhance the City’s geospatial analytics for stormwater management, and ensure SUFs are equitably distributed amongst property owners.

Like more than 2,500 other US municipalities, the City of Billings leverages a fee to fund critical infrastructure development, maintenance, and improvements. The current fee is calculated based on square footage and zoning classification data, which does not accurately reflect each property’s specific contribution to runoff. The City is seeking to make these fees more equitable and accurate by leveraging impervious surface data to calculate SUF rates, but keeping such a detailed database up-to-date with a rapidly changing world is not always feasible by traditional data creation methods. To be sure that SUFs are calculated using a true representation of the physical world, the City turned to Ecopia’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered mapping technology, which extracts land cover features from imagery more efficiently than manual digitization. 

Using high-resolution aerial imagery, Ecopia’s AI-based mapping systems extracted 16 distinct vector layers of impervious surfaces across the City of Billings’ 45 square mile area in just four weeks. These vector layers accurately represent impervious land cover on each property throughout the City, providing the data needed to understand stormwater runoff and its impact on infrastructure. 

Ecopia’s AI-based systems digitized the following map layers for the City of Billings:

• Bridges
• Buildings
• Compacted surfaces
• Decks
• Driveways
• Paved parking lots
• Paved roads
• Paved sidewalks
• Paved sports grounds
• Pavement
• Railways
• Swimming pools
• Unpaved parking lots
• Unpaved roads
• Unpaved sidewalks
• Unpaved sports grounds

“We are thrilled to incorporate Ecopia’s high-precision impervious surface data into our stormwater management workflows,” said Tyler Westrope from the City of Billings. “No other data provider could match Ecopia’s accuracy or efficiency in feature extraction, and we are looking forward to equitably enhancing our community’s stormwater program with the addition of this foundational data.”

“Ecopia regularly works with municipalities to create critical data for equitable stormwater utility fee calculation and analysis,” said Justin Proctor, Associate at Ecopia AI. “We are proud to support the City of Billings in its stormwater management and climate resilience efforts, which set an example for other municipalities looking to drive innovation through geospatial data.”

For more information on Ecopia, click here. To view our HD map samples, click here.

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About the City of Billings
Billings is the largest city in Montana, with a population estimated at 117,116 as of 2020.  Located in the south-central portion of the state, it is the seat of Yellowstone County and the principal city of the Billings Metropolitan Area, which has a population of 171,677.  Billings is the trade and distribution center for much of Montana east of the Continental Divide, Northern Wyoming, and western portions of North Dakota and South Dakota.  Billings is also the largest retail destination for much of the same area and has a trade area of over 500,000 people.

Within the City of Billings, the Public Works Department carefully allocates available resources to provide services which protect public health and safety, as well as support the quality of life enjoyed by the Billings community.  The Public Works Department consists of: engineering services; environmental monitoring and protection; stormwater management; street and traffic resource maintenance and repair; solid waste collection; utilities operations; and facility management of the Billings Regional Landfill, the water treatment plant, the wastewater reclamation facility.  

About Ecopia AI
Ecopia is on a mission to create a digital twin of the Earth. We leverage artificial intelligence to convert high-resolution imagery into high-definition (HD) vector maps. These maps form a digital representation of reality and are embedded into decision-making applications, offering unique insight at scale. Ecopia’s HD vector maps are leveraged for hundreds of commercial and government applications across over 100 countries around the world.