Earlier this spring, I had the good fortune of attending the 59th Photogrammetric Week in Stuttgart1. Spectacular in every sense of the word, the biennial meetup colloquially known as PhoWo offered marvelous overviews of the state-of-the-art in photogrammetry, lidar and remote sensing.
After PhoWo, I continued eastwards, to attend the ISPRS Geospatial Week in Dubai, the biggest of the seven United Arab Emirates, an amazing city that has successfully moved its economy away from dependence on oil. I had the privilege of giving travel awards, financed by The ISPRS Foundation, to 22 successful applicants. At this late stage in my career, however, it’s gratifying to sit in technical sessions and hear the presentations, many of which are meticulously prepared accounts of high-level work by PhD students and postdocs. In LIDAR Magazine we report on new products in the marketplace and on successful projects that companies have completed, but it’s fascinating to listen to these enthusiastic young researchers describing investigations that will give rise to the developments that we will see on exhibition booths in the years to come. The next ISPRS Geospatial Week will be hosted by the Polish Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and the Association of Polish Surveyors in September 2027 in Warsaw, Poland.
On to the articles in this edition. In our last issue, we enjoyed the first “Content to Serve” piece from new contributing writer John Welter2, where he drew on his knowledge not only on the latest offerings from Hexagon Geosystems but also his frequent interactions with customers around the globe to tease out important trends in the industry. On page 6, we introduce John the person. He has a background of decades of practical experience in the industry, much of it in the family business, North West Geomatics, which was acquired by Hexagon in 2014. We need people who truly understand our complex, fast-moving industry and can explain to us what is happening. John is one of them.
While our principal subject matter is lidar, we like to publish material from time to time on other active sensors, such as synthetic aperture radar, ground penetrating radar, and sonar. Beginning on page 10, Peter Stewart of Trimble Applanix provides an insight on the importance of position and attitude in sonar data acquisition and processing. He also highlights how the user experience with this technology is improving as it evolves.
Trimble Business Center (TBC) is the subject of an article by three company managers, Khrystyna Bezborodova, Ben Messer and Thomas Widmer. Thomas, a senior product manager, was in the strong team that Trimble fielded in Stuttgart in April. There’s a lot more to this article than espousal of Trimble’s software leviathan. It explores the customer requirements that drive the innovations and underlines the importance of several developments. It echoes John Welter’s assessment of trends, for example how pervasive and essential is AI, especially deep learning, to the rapid extraction of information from data.
On page 20, we bring the third part of Gottfried Mandlburger’s tutorial series, “Airborne lidar: a tutorial for 2025.” Part III focuses on bathymetric lidar. Gottfried provides a concise, well written introduction to the challenges of lidar measurement through water and examines some of the ways these have been addressed, before exploring some of the systems currently on the market. We are delighted that Gottfried chose to publish this superb didactic material with us and were overjoyed when he cited the series during his invited presentation in Stuttgart.
Our fifth article, found on page 30, shares the thoughts of Walter Lappert, former director of reality capture for Allen3D3, as he reflects on the role of lidar in discovery, restoration and preservation. Interestingly enough, one of our recent podcast guests was James Rush, Lidar Subject Matter Expert at Allen & Company, Winter Garden, Florida3. Allen & Company has a subsidiary, Allen3D, which concentrates on reality capture of the built environment4.
Another of our contributing writers, Qassim Abdullah, who strides the stage of US lidar and has been instrumental in moving our industry forward in so many ways, is the author of our last article, which begins on page 32, addressing Edition 2, Version 2 (2024) of the ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards for Digital Geospatial Data. Qassim explains the value of RMSE as the gauge of accuracy and describes critical quantities such as horizontal, vertical and 3D accuracy as well as vegetated and non-vegetated measures. The Standards have been published in a document that runs to 225 pages, so this article is a useful guide. Indeed, Qassim ends with a summary of the six addenda, which are brimming with information of immense value to practitioners. Like many of Qassim’s major contributions, this one is also published in Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing (PE&RS). Qassim has been a productive and selfless contributor to both LIDAR Magazine and our sister journal, The American Surveyor. Indeed, his next piece on the Standards is already in our pipeline.
On page 48, we close with a book review of 25¢ Piano Lessons, the autobiography of lidar luminary David Maune. LIDAR Magazine knows David well and it was a huge privilege to present him in 2018 with the inaugural Lidar Leader Award for Outstanding Personal Achievement. The book is primarily an honest, easy-to-read account of a long, remarkable life. It’s not a technical book, but David’s geospatial work is a thread throughout, and he provides an appendix with cameos of some of the technologies with which he has worked in a career lasting more than 60 years. There’s another appendix on the business uses and benefits of DEMs – for those of us who have known Dave mainly in the 21st century, this encompasses the skills for which he is famous, quantifying these benefits and writing the results into compelling reports on which US government and agencies have acted. The essence of the book, however, is Dave’s life story, which revolves round family and friends. In particular, it showcases his resilience as life’s slings and arrows have taken their toll over the decades. A wonderful read!
We end with tremendous news. My old friend and colleague, Ron Roth, is joining LIDAR Magazine as an associate editor, dissecting news from within the lidar world, as well as relevant geospatial news encountered in the popular press. It’s enormously gratifying to read in the mass media accounts where lidar is centerstage, such as a recent piece on flooding and landslides in Kentucky5. Ron was a co-founder of lidar start-up Azimuth Corporation in Westford, Massachusetts. We met when we were both involved in the acquisition of Azimuth by LH Systems, part of what is now Hexagon. The Azimuth system became the Leica ALS40 and the rest is history. I well remember customers patiently queueing to talk to Ron on trade show booths all round the world. We welcome him to our group and look forward to his keen analysis of what’s going on. 
5 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/29/appalachia-kentucky-floods-research-trump-cuts