We are pleased to announce that four new point clouds datasets have been posted to OpenTopography. The datasets were collected by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) and cover portions of California, Florida, Idaho and North Carolina. These datasets were collected for a variety of scientific purposes including identifying Scrub-Jay habitat, detecting a landscape's response to tectonics and looking at forest leaf structure.
National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping Datasets:
NCALM is an NSF-funded center that supports the use of airborne laser mapping technology (a.k.a. lidar) in the scientific community and is jointly operated by the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California-Berkeley. The datasets were collected under NCALM's graduate student seed proposal program that awards ten projects per year to graduate student PIs who need lidar data for their research. Each collection is typically limited to no more than 40 square kilometers. This batch of NCALM datasets were collected in 2008 and 2009.
Point cloud with intensity values (left) and Google Earth (right) image for a portion of the Point Reyes, CA dataset.