What is LIDAR?

Back by popular demand, the Natural Resource committee of IGIC is having a second Lidar hands-on workshop Wednesday May 31, from 10am to 2:30pm, at UNI’s Geography Dept. Cedar Falls, IA. Emphasis will be on natural resource type applications of Lidar, but everyone is welcome to attend.

We’ll start with a quick review of ‘what is lidar’, and then look at some real data from around the state using ArcMAP. If you’re not fluent in ArcMAP we’ll try to pair you up with someone else who is. We’ll have data from the five watersheds that DNR and others flew last spring. We’ll also have data from the Des Moines Lidar project to view. We’ll look at different Lidar products – first return and last return point clouds, intensity images, and bare earth DEMs. We’ll create some derived products from the bare earth DEM including shaded relief images, slope maps and contours. We’ll use the shaded relief images along with color NAIP and CIR Doqqs to photo interpret features that one can see with the Lidar data. We’ll look at noise in the data and compare the accuracy with some photogrammetrically derived elevation contours.

We’ll talk about the status of a statewide Lidar project for the state of Iowa.

If anyone else has data they would like to contribute to the workshop, please let me know.

We have about 25 seats for this so let me know if you’d like to attend soon. We’ll send a map to the workshop later when we know the room number.

This workshop is sponsored by UNI’s Geotree Project http://geotree.geog.uni.edu/

Jim Giglierano
Iowa DNR – Geological Survey
109 Trowbridge Hall
Iowa City, IA 52242-1319
319-335-1594
jgiglierano@igsb.uiowa.edu