Hydrographic Information Services, Inc. (HIS) is a Professional Hydrographic, Surveying and Mapping, small business, located in Jacksonville Florida servicing federal, local and private entities throughout the Southeastern United States and Caribbean in the specialized field of Hydrogaphy. The firm offers to its clients dozens of years of experience and knowledge pertaining to the standards, technologies, and data presentation for charting of inland and coastal water bodies and their littoral land areas. HIS blends together the fields of Hydrography and Professional Surveying and Mapping, providing marine engineering, coastal engineering and marine construction entities a one-stop source for their information needs.
HIS has successfully conducted many types of hydrographic studies involving the use of highly advanced, in-house, equipment including multi-frequency fathometers, dual-frequency side scan sonar, and cesium vapor magnetometer. HIS personnel have undertaken hydrographic studies associated with coastal erosion determination and mitigation, large-scale commercial shipping lane and harbor maintenance and construction, pipeline installation inspection, cultural resource search and demarcation, hard-bottom mapping, and object detection.

Coastal surveying is one of HIS’s specialties.  The company is proud to be involved in efforts to protect our nation’s fragile and environmentally sensitive coastline.  HIS’s coastal crews have conducted surveys to identify and quantify erosion, to design nourishment, and to monitor the condition of beaches throughout Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama.  The company has also been called upon to perform rapid response surveys immediately following hurricanes to help federal, state, and local municipalities better understand, and design for, the effects of such events on various types of coastline.  HIS is a leader in the application of RTK (real-time-kinematic) GPS surveying in coastal zones.  This technology facilitates the collection of large amounts of high quality, topographic and hydrographic data in an environmentally friendly way.

The company is continually involved in large-scale channel, harbor construction and maintenance.  These services include bathymetric surveys for the assessment of marine facility conditions and the calculation of available and excavated material quantities both before and after dredging operations.HIS has also conducted navigation condition surveys in various locations including federally maintained shipping channels, port facilities, public and private recreation waterways, and lakes.  In pace with our commitment to provide our clients with the latest technology and most cost effective products, HIS personnel continually take part and attend technical conferences and continuing education seminars.

HIS is also a leading provider of specialty Underwater Remote Sensing products and services. The company’s dual frequency side scan sonar imaging system has been utilized to; inspect the installation of submarine pipeline crossings, to search prospective borrow sites for potential debris or artifacts of archeological or historical significance, to determine the best possible submerged pipeline routes, to illustrate the location of moorings at an anchorage, to chart offshore fishery sites and to determine the presence of man-made materials in “no dumping” areas. The company also has the in-house capability to conduct marine magnetometer surveys.  These surveys measure the earth’s magnetic field and any anomalies therein.  These anomalies represent objects containing ferrous materials.  Positional and amplitude data of these anomalies can help isolate them so that they may be more closely studied, typically by a diver or side scan sonar imaging.  These technologies (side scan sonar and magnetometry) are popular among agencies wishing to secure permits for potential offshore or near shore borrow sites for beach nourishment projects.