Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/103965
Technology Adoption Forestry, Defense and More LiDAR plays a critical role in forestry. The 3-D foreststructure information derived from LiDAR can be used for stand delineation, timber inventory, wildlife and habitat monitoring, watershed and wetland management, fire-risk assessment, and overall management of forestry operations. With this wealth of digital information, there's less need for costly and time-consuming field work. On a global scale, LiDAR data help government agencies, commercial forest operations and non-governmental organizations better manage forests to produce healthy, sustainable ecosystems. From a defense and military perspective, detailed understanding of terrain, cover and signal propagation makes military forces safer and more effective. LiDAR, in conjunction with other data types, is effective in detecting change, producing cross-country mobility maps, finding suitable landing zones, and planning ingress and egress routes. In addition, combining airborne, terrestrial and mobile LiDAR provides the backbone of the data required for 3-D city modeling and urban planning. These city models enable smarter decisions when it comes to disaster management, event planning, marketing, simulation of new infrastructure and change detection. Managing LiDAR Data Collecting LiDAR data is an expensive undertaking, and organizations and governments often are constrained by tight budgets. Today, it's more important than ever A graphic shows a 3-D mobile LiDAR dataset colored by intensity. 28 G E O W O R L D / J A N U A R Y 2 O 1 3 to be a good custodian of data and have the tools to fully exploit the investment. Next-generation "lifecycle solutions" are emerging that allow organizations to exploit the wealth of information contained in LiDAR data as well as share it rapidly and securely to drive smarter decision making. For example, new toolsets are allowing organizations to generate point clouds photogrammetrically that work directly with airborne, mobile, terrestrial and photogrammetric point-cloud data. It's critical to be able to leverage robust remotesensing applications with LiDAR data to make these insights actionable. New toolsets include the ability to simultaneously view point clouds in 2-D and 3-D as well as cross section, scale, color and filter the points. In addition, these new LiDAR toolsets enable editing, RGB encoding, classification and more. Bringing together the power of photogrammetry, remote sensing, LiDAR and GIS is paramount for effective workflows for progressive organizations. With many solutions that offer LiDAR tools as add-ons or standalone packages, it's ideal to use solutions that leverage point clouds as importantly as imagery and vector data, which all are critical for effective geospatial analysis. This is where the concept of "full lifecycle" comes into play and ultimately makes LiDAR data as important as any other GIS capability within an organization. When it comes to keeping an organization's geospatial and associated data organized, it's ideal to take advantage of comprehensive data management, analysis and delivery systems. Such systems enable an organization to catalog, search, discover, process and securely disseminate massive volumes of LiDARbased data. For example, some newer solutions enable administrators to automatically catalog incoming data by setting up "listeners" on directories to automatically catalog incoming data of interest. During the workflow's data crawl and catalog steps, some "lifecycle solutions" provide automatic conversion of LiDAR (LAS) data to grid format. LAS data can be gridded quickly and automatically, because they're dense and semi-regular, which lends to easy conversion to raster format. LAS data are gridded for easy viewing, distribution and server-side processing of elevation data using Web Processing Services (WPSs) on a Digital Elevation Model. The gridded LiDAR data then can be made available for consumption by end users via Web Mapping Service, Web Coverage Service and WPS. Or users can download them and "clip, zip and ship" immediately. LAS-formatted point-cloud data also may be downloaded in their entirety. Another important feature is the ability to clip, zip and ship LAS-formatted point-cloud data (in whole or just a subset) using newer out-of-the-box Web Imagery/LIDAR Special Issue