Collecting Lidar

DOGAMI leads the Oregon Lidar Consortium, which was created in 2007 with the goal of providing high-quality lidar data coverage for the entire state. An initial $2 million seed capital investment by the Oregon Legislature has since been leveraged into more than $19 million of lidar acquisition.

Lidar Projects

Since 2008, DOGAMI has ordered 72 lidar flights, supported by funding from more than 80 partners. High-resolution lidar data has been acquired for almost 46,886 square miles in Oregon—approximately 48 percent of the state and about 98 percent of Oregon’s populated areas.

Projects start with a partner interested in funding a specific area, and DOGAMI then works to enlarge that area by finding additional partners and adding consortium funds to create contiguous blocks of lidar collection.

Interested in partnering with the OLC to collect lidar? Contact us

Lidar in Action: Portland Metro Area Project. A 2014 $951,000 project collected 976 square miles of lidar data and orthophotos in the Portland area. Ordering individual flights would have cost nearly $6 million, according to calculations by project partner Metro. The more than 30 partners – including cities, counties, transportation agencies and the U.S. Geological Survey – have access to all the data. Partners are putting the lidar to many uses, from helping 9-1-1 dispatchers have up-to-date information for first responders to inventorying buildings to surveying urban tree canopy.

How Lidar is Collected

Airborne lidar uses a laser range finder mounted in a precisely navigated aircraft to scan the earth's surface at very high rates and collect very dense clouds of X-Y-Z coordinates. OLC projects are collected by NV5 Geospatial Inc. of Corvallis, Ore.

Amendment 10 to Agency-Specific Price Agreement 7525 provides detailed technical specifications and information on optional lidar services. Lidar Pricing (PDF).

Technical Specifications

DOGAMI requires aggregate design multi-swath density of at least 8 pulses per square meter. The higher-than-typical density is absolutely necessary to get accurate bare earth coverage in a state that’s as forested as Oregon. The Agency also has a four-point quality control program in place that stringently reviews specifications for data completeness, swath to swath data consistency, digital elevation model requirements, and absolute accuracy of bare earth DEMs. Current technical specifications include:

Project Reports

• Data survey reports are provided by the vendor and generally contain a project overview as well as aerial acquisition, ground survey, accuracy, and density information.
• Data acceptance reports contain a description of the project area, data completeness and control checks, quality consistency results, and absolute accuracy analysis.

These reports are also linked from project area layer popups in the data viewer

Notes: Some report PDF file sizes are very large.

(last updated 09/08/2022)