Lidar is cool. Our <1m coverage in SE AK is miniscule, but that should change in the coming years.
One of my local juvenile fish survey areas has great lidar coverage, and I used some of those files and nifty online viewer (FugroView) to answer some broad questions about streambed gradient and the possible presence of barriers to anadromy. Below is a screenshot of the viewer - the left hand frame has an overview of the stream rendered in TIN (triangulated irregular network, easy way to represent bare earth features) with a blue bounding rectangle over both the main channel and the tributary channel I was curious about. The bottom right view is the 3D representation of the left frame as viewed from downstream, with the bounding retangle hovering above the surface. The upper right hand box is the point cloud within the bounding rectangle as viewed from ground level - the main channel is the wide flat to the far right, the trib channel is the small U to the left. With this I can move the bounding rectangle up and down the tributary channel looking for potential barriers that may exclude anadromous fish from using the upstream habitat and compare/measure surface height relative to the known surface height of the creek...
Did I mention lidar is cool?
View attachment 23847
. He's a serious rockhound that has audited the 300 series courses at CWU and has a full lapidary shop. This morning I went to the WGS Lidar Portal using the link at the bottom of the webpage you linked to, figured out how it works, then looked up some of the places I've been with him. I texted the link to him and he immediately called to find out how to use it and we talked for 45 minutes examining places he's studied with topo and satellite maps. I see some applications for fishing too; i.e. identifying where an abandoned overgrown road goes in deep timber along a blue line I like to fish. And you can download the LIDAR, topo, and satellite layers' images to take with you in the field. Cool stuff!
