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Discover allows you to connect to streaming tile services of our base maps and imagery, freeing you from downloading and storing massive amounts of data. They also work great in web maps as background layers for your data.

Discover serves data as either a single full raster (WMS) or a set of pre-rendered raster tiles (WMTS). WMTS should be used wherever possible to access any of our base maps or imagery services.

Prohibition of Automated Processing

Automated, large-scale processing of imagery from the WMTS and WMS services is prohibited. This includes mass data extraction, scraping, automated Python scripts, computer vision algorithms, machine learning tools, or artificial intelligence (AI) model training and inference against the live service endpoints. A local copy of data can be arranged, if it is needed for these purposes. UGRC reserves the right to cut off any users that are abusing the Discover service with exceedingly high-volume usage.

Connecting your client

You can connect to Discover using a variety of desktop and web clients, including QGIS, ArcGIS Pro, AutoCAD, and ArcGIS Online.

Licensed imagery

Licensed Discover access includes our high-res imagery licensed from Hexagon and Google. These services have their own considerations and restrictions and are only available to users associated with the State or its entities.

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Coordinate systems and accuracy

Discover services use the Web Mercator WGS84 projection (wkid/EPSG 3857). You may need to transform or project your data to match.

Discover hosts several different imagery services, each with its own accuracy and resolution.

Common problems and issues

Discover uses the common and open source WMS and WMTS standards, but you may still run into some problems.

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