Lidar Short Course at 2011 Geological Society of America Meeting

Ian Madin (Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries) and I will be teaching an introductory lidar short course at the 2011 Geological Society of America annual meeting in Minneapolis in October.

Details from the GSA Short Course page:

514. Introduction to the Acquisition, Visualization, and Interpretation of Airborne LiDAR Data

Sat., 8 Oct., 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
$110. Limit: 30. CEU: 0.9.
Cosponsors: OpenTopography; GSA Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division; GSA Structural Geology and Tectonics Division; GSA Environmental and Engineering Geology Division; GSA Geoinformatics Divisions.
Ian Madin, Oregon Dept. of Geology and Mineral Industries; Chris Crosby, Univ. of California at San Diego.

This course provides and introduction to the acquisition and use of airborne LiDAR data. It covers LiDAR collection fundamentals, how to contract for good data, where to find data and tools, how to visualize point and grid data, and how to do simple feature extraction from LiDAR-derived DEMs. The course will use ESRI ArcGIS and USFS Fusion software, and each student will have a dedicated workstation and real world data to use in hands-on exercises.

In this one-day course we'll emphasize the basics of lidar technology, the overall data collection, processing and analysis workflow, and will provide a hands-on introduction to working with both point cloud and gridded data products. The course is appropriate for faculty, graduate students, and geoscience professionals who are interested in applying lidar topography data to their work.

This course will be similar to the one we taught at the 2009 GSA meeting in Portland. Materials from that course can be found in the OpenTopography Short Courses section. The 2009 course was at capacity, so register early.