The year began with informative visits to Geo Week in Denver in February and the YellowScan LiDAR Convention 2026 (YLC) in Aix-en-Provence in April. These were very different – the first a major international conference, the second a user meeting with customers from around the globe. The first attracted more than 3000, 25 times as much as the second. These events tend to pass so fast and generate a blur in one’s memory — too many products, too many meetings in too short a time. Nevertheless, in Denver I was struck by the tremendous emphasis on AI, which is now prevalent in point classification, feature extraction and far beyond — both suppliers and practitioners use it routinely. In Aix, the impression given by YellowScan’s customers was that UAV-lidar is routine, including BVLOS linear collections, but that there is still a sense of adventure. YellowScan itself is transitioning from integrator to manufacturer too, with its Navigator topobathymetric system and other in-house initiatives. Florian Caraveo of YellowScan, who had an article in the last issue of LIDAR Magazine, is my co-author of a report about YLC, exploring trends discernible from the content. In each case I returned home inspired by the vibrancy of our lidar industry and its people.
This issue is a little different from usual, in the sense that its content has a European flavor. Daan van der Heide and his Dutch co-authors, from Rijkswaterstaat and Delft University of Technology, describe a portal to enable users to find elevation data in Europe, where the numerous countries and smaller jurisdictions have assembled a wealth of very disparate datasets. This has been brought to our attention in the splendid “Elevations for the Nations” series by Ada Perello of the European Association of Aerial Surveying Industries (EAASI).
Ada is one of our contributors in this issue too. EAASI has come of age and its annual meetings have gained in attendance, stature and value. She describes its seventh summit, in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The resemblance of EAASI to MAPPS is hard to overlook, but Ada is firm that the latter has been “an inspiration rather than a template.”
The strength in depth of European geospatial expertise has never been in question – ISPRS started in 1910! The patchwork of countries, their subdivisions and the subdivisions’ subdivisions means that there are competent geospatial agencies at all levels, as Marc Riedo’s article confirms. He provides a powerful description of a windstorm that wreaked havoc in parts of canton Neuchâtel in Switzerland and the data collection that took place immediately thereafter, leading to authoritative support for remedial work and planning for the future. Switzerland is small, certainly, but the area affected was too large for UAV-lidar to be practical, so local company Sixense Helimap was contracted, located near Lausanne in canton Vaud. It deployed a helicopter fitted with its own, custom-built Hexacam sensor. Marc is head of the GIS center in canton Neuchâtel as well as one of his co-authors; the others are from La Chaux-des-Fonds, the city most affected by the windstorm, and Sixense Helimap. Marc is passionate about the use of lidar, especially for forestry applications. He has been talking about these on Swiss TV and radio. We have already received his second article for LIDAR Magazine.
Complementing these three articles from Europe are three from the US – who says we don’t have balance? Contributing writer Qassim Abdullah, VP and chief scientist, Woolpert, introduces his idea of smart pixels. Suffice it to say that he advocates every pixel being stuffed not just with color information but with all sorts of data, metadata and linkages. The primary goal is to empower digital twins to fulfill their potential by becoming much more than just stunning, detailed visualizations. We have mentioned this before in the magazine: it’s an easy jump from laser scanning to digital twins at their most basic, but it’s harder to understand what else is possible, all the way to a digital twin being a dynamic, incredibly powerful, decision-making tool.
Data centers are always in the news. Every day we learn about one, often a Big Tech project, probably bigger than anything before, or using more electricity, or causing arguments about land – anyway, they are ubiquitous, necessary for AI, and critical to our society. Constructing them isn’t easy as they have special requirements, including high accuracy and speed. Duane Gleason of Trimble explores how laser scanning is helping meet some of the challenges in this niche of the construction industry. BIM and as-built documentation are essential. Our industry is well placed to meet the demands of these fabulously rich, demanding customers.
The last article is very different and far-reaching. Key to successful bathymetric and topobathymetric lidar projects is mission planning, not just selecting parameters to meet project needs, such as point density and flying height, placing flight lines, considering aviation fuel, air traffic control, battery life and so on, but choosing when to fly the mission so that water conditions are optimal for bathymetric lidar. There can be many factors behind this – an easily understood one is that recent rain causes rivers to bring materials and currents to lakes and the ocean such that the water is more turbid. I’ve had conversations about this with contributing writer Al Karlin of Dewberry, and, at the aforementioned YLC, Michel Assenbaum, president of YellowScan. There are various ways of making the decision when to fly – and obviously the most successful companies are rather good at it – but an extremely promising approach is to use satellite imagery. In an eloquent, well-argued piece, Emily French, a remote sensing specialist at Denver-based TCarta, explains how water clarity monitoring can be accomplished using readily available satellite imagery. Her company’s HydroIQ product is already in use by several service companies for their bathymetric work in various parts of the world.
We end with two of our recurring features. Contributing writer John Russo provides his second “USIBD Matters” column with more about the USIBD Level of Accuracy Specification v3.1 and the new LOA Practitioner’s Guide, recently published to help users apply LOA.
We have a new associate editor of LIDAR Magazine, Ron Roth. Many readers will have encountered Ron, truly a lidar guru, when he was product manager for airborne lidar at LH Systems, Leica, Leica Geosystems and Hexagon. Ron and I go back a long way. I first met him in the late 1990s, when he, Doug Flint and others founded a start-up in Massachusetts to produce high-altitude airborne lidar sensors. I was with LH Systems at the time — we made haste to acquire Azimuth and brand the sensor as the Leica ALS40. We have been conscious for some time that LIDAR Magazine needs to do more to bring you the news. We post on our website most of the press releases received from companies’ communications departments. But lidar is now in both the technical and the popular press every day. Ron’s column, “Last Return”, is designed to help interpret some of this by taking a big story and looking at what’s behind it. In this issue he talks about Ouster’s recent announcement of the “world’s first native color lidar sensors,” its REV08 OS family. Enjoy.