Mark Ducey of the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station has been investigating how aerial and ground light detection and ranging — better known as LiDAR — can be used to provide more accurate and detailed information about forests. The technology maps three-dimensional land surface elevations.
Ducey and his research team have partnered with the U.S. Forest Service and National Resource Conservation Service to work on projects in the White Mountain National Forest to see how LiDAR can help map rare plant communities, wildlife, soils and timber management. They found an old homestead with a well that would be big enough for someone to fall into.
“The old-fashioned way of doing this is really labor-intensive and probably not affordable in the long run for the U.S. Forest Service,” Ducey said. “The airborne LiDAR maps land forms and provide an initial guess of what we might find on the land. The role of the field work is then to verify what is there rather than starting from a blank sheet of paper,” he said.
