Lidar Derivatives for California

North Coast Resource Partnership (NCRP) will provide county-by-county lidar derivatives in early 2025

Overview

The State Coastal Conservancy and NASA recently provided the NCRP with funding to create a set of county-by-county lidar derivatives across the North Coast of California. Working in collaboration with the  Coastal San Luis RCD , the NCRP will create the lidar products across 13 California Counties (see the figure 2 below). These lidar products will provide land managers public datasets depicting fine scale topography and forest structure that provide important foundational data for various applications. Figure 1 provides a very high level conceptual illustration of how the derivatives 'unlock' the point cloud, providing land managers lacking access to expensive software and lidar processing expertise with actionable data for numerous applications.

The derivatives will be made public on  https://pacificvegmap.org/  and on ArcGIS Online and will be linked to from the  North Coast Resource Partnership's  web site. Assuming that there are no delays in USGS's approval of the new North Coast preliminary point clouds collected in 2022 and 2023 to fill lidar gaps across the region, these lidar products will be made publicly available by March 1, 2025.

The lidar derivative creation work is part of a NCRP's larger data strategy, which includes wall-to-wall lidar for the region (accomplished through 2021 & 2022 fundraising efforts), computational derivative creation from the wall-to-wall point cloud (this effort), and future efforts to develop additional datasets including lidar derived hydrography (including regional elevation derived NHD), lidar derived maps of functional riparian areas, and additional fine scale landscape-characterizing data.

Derivative Specifications

The set of 'computational derivatives' will be created by first harmonizing the most recent and highest quality lidar point clouds from the 13 counties. The harmonized point cloud will be one of the deliverables. The other vector and raster deliverables, which will be delivered as countywide raster and vector data products with metadata and datasheets are shown in Table 1.

If you have questions related to this effort, please contact Karen Gaffney (kgaffney@northcoastresourcepartnership.org) or Mark Tukman (mark@tukmangeospatial.net).