Celebrating Lidar Worldwide

Dr. A. Stewart Walker02.10.2025

This issue was released at the Geo Week conference in Denver on 10–12 February. By no coincidence, this year’s event concludes on World Lidar Day. I’d be amiss if I didn’t commend the team at Diversified Communications, host of Geo Week, for their efforts leading up to this year’s celebration. Senior managers Lora Burns and Carla Lauter went to great lengths over the recent weeks (and months!) to develop promotions, a dedicated panel discussion, special exhibit areas and more. We owe them a debt of gratitude.

World Lidar Day was designed to raise awareness about the value of lidar. Ultimately, the platform is intended to generate discussion and aid discovery about the promise of geospatial technology, something we can all get behind and benefit from. Note that if you or your firm develops or utilizes lidar technology, the founding member organizations encourage you to share a little about how or why it’s beneficial on February 12th.

This edition’s cover-story highlights another founding member organization that has made great strides in developing the World Lidar Day mission: Woolpert. The feature that begins on page eight highlights their successful lidar collections over Eastern Arkansas as a 3DEP update. Arkansas’s GIO, Shelby Johnson, co-authors the piece with Woolpert program manager, Sam Moffat. The two cover not only 3DEP and its refreshment, but also the wide-ranging benefits it brings to the state.

On page 16 you’ll find part II of Gottfried Mandlburger’s series, Airborne Lidar: a Tutorial for 2025. This segment covers how integrated systems, where lidar and camera(s) are combined, are configured and the advantages they bring. Though LIDAR Magazine is published in the U.S. and this issue is centered on Geo Week, we must remember that there’s a lot going on overseas too. We’ve already begun the Elevation for the Nations series by Ada Perello of EAASI1, who summarizes the various nationwide lidar programs being conducted in Europe. We can report that PCP2025, the 4th International Workshop Point Cloud Processing2, held in Stuttgart four days before Geo Week, was fully booked well before the event. More focused, and equally attractive, is 3D Underwater3: this 3rd underwater workshop, to be held at TU Wien on 8-11 July 2025, is organized by Gottfried and his colleagues on behalf of ISPRS Working Group II/74, CIPA Heritage Documentation5 and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photogrammetrie, Fernerkundung und Geoinformation6 (DGPF: the German Society for Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation). 3D Underwater will be a strong meeting and is highly recommended. These and other technical meetings taking place internationally are listed on the ISPRS Calendar7.

Geo Week marks the 10th anniversary of the founding of the boutique French company, BayesMap Solutions8. On page 28, we offer an article by founder and president Dr. André Jalobeanu. He writes as if he is interviewing himself, allowing him to reveal some of the motivation behind the creation and development of his company and explore aspects of the technical side. Those of us who grappled, with varying degrees of success, with Bayesian inference during undergraduate statistics courses, can but admire how this penetrating approach is devastatingly effective when applied to lidar data. Many firms in the U.S. and beyond use BayesMap software for lidar strip alignment, but other major capabilities are also available.

I remember well the podcast conducted with Vivien Hériard-Dubreuil, CEO of Microdrones9. On page 34, we are pleased to follow this up with an article from the GeoCue10 part of Microdrones, in which Bret Burghdurf relates how Terra Brasil11 uses LP360 software to integrate airborne lidar with bathymetric data to generate the deliverables required by its clients.

On page 40, we have an installment of USIBD Matters from John Russo, president and CEO of Architectural Resource Consultants, a firm of architects in Tustin, California. John is also founder and past president of the U.S. Institute of Building Documentation (USIBD). In this capacity, he has submitted a piece about version 3.1 of USIBD’s Level of Accuracy specification, which was released just as this issue was going to print12.

Immediately afterwards, Amar Nayegandhi, now in post and working hard in Woolpert’s St. Petersburg office, addresses an important question in the latest installment of his Full Coverage column (supported by Al Karlin). We are all excited by the ease with which we can acquire more and more data, but is there a threshold at which diminishing returns set in with respect to lidar density?

Last but not least, on page 48, we are delighted to welcome a new Contributing Writer. John Welter, Division President, Geospatial Content Solutions (GCS) at Hexagon Geosystems, is a well-known figure, both to the Leica Geosystems customers whom he visits round the globe, but also to the wider geospatial community. John and his father Fred ran a thriving geospatial services company, North West Geomatics, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This was acquired by Hexagon in 2014 and the result has not only been energetic management of the Leica Geosystems airborne sensors, but also the creation and growth of the content program. The first instalment of his Content to Serve column highlights three major trends for 2025: AI, cloud computing, and sustainability. It’s intriguing how John complements Gottfried’s teaching on the technology of hybrid sensors, by proselytizing their reduced flight times and carbon emissions compared to traditional dual-mission data collection.

As we celebrate World Lidar Day, therefore, we can perceive the contents of this issue as a microcosm of our favorite light detection and ranging technology’s success: massive data acquisition for a successful government program and the benefits; hybrid/integrated sensors; the sophistication and reliability of software products that have been many years in the making; the evolution of building documentation and its role as an enabler; AI, the cloud and sustainability; and the question of how much data is enough. Another trend, however, underlies all this like a palimpsest—digital twins, which will attract users and demonstrate successes throughout the year. Thank you for being part of the LIDAR Magazine community.

About the Author

Dr. A. Stewart Walker

Stewart is the Managing Editor of the magazine. He holds MA, MScE and PhD degrees in geography and geomatics from the universities of Glasgow, New Brunswick and Bristol, and an MBA from Heriot-Watt. He is an ASPRS-certified photogrammetrist. More articles...