Environmental Monitoring and Mapping Using 3D Elevation Program Data

Dear Colleagues,

The use of lidar remote sensing has grown tremendously, becoming one of the most ubiquitous remote sensing tools for understanding the earth in three dimensions with incredibly high resolution and accuracy. To respond to growing needs for high quality elevation data, the 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) is attempting to collect lidar for the entire United States (IfSAR in Alaska) by 2023. This baseline of elevation data, provided to the public for free and in open formats, is hoped to improve operational work as well as foster research.

With over 67% of the United States collected or in progress with Quality Level 2 or better lidar (and 100% of Alaska with IfSAR), and an available public repository of over 15 trillion lidar points (and growing) spread over 1100 projects covering almost 20 years, a wealth of public lidar data is available for environmental monitoring and mapping applications. Although most of these projects were collected and have been used for operational needs, this repository offers tremendous opportunities for research needs, and research using these data can help improve future directions of 3DEP. At present, 3DEP data are available via FTP and in the cloud, and connected to various computing services, such as OpenTopography and CyVerse.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to demonstrate the value of 3DEP data for research applications. Whereas preference will be given to environmental monitoring and mapping applications, any papers and research contributions using 3DEP data will be considered. Contributions covering the following subtopics are welcome:

• Use of 3DEP lidar point clouds to extract and understand vegetation information
• Extraction of new features from 3DEP source data
• Use of 3DEP DEMs for understanding environmental processes
• Use of 3DEP data to identify and understand natural hazards and associated processes
• Use of 3DEP data in combination with other sources of topographic data to understand landscape change associated with natural or anthropogenic processes
• Continental scale uses of 3DEP seamless DEMs
• New methodologies to understand the quality and accuracy of 3DEP data for environmental applications
• Synergies and fusion of 3DEP data (DEMs and/or point clouds) with multi- and hyperspectral imagery
• Synergies and fusion of 3DEP data with global data, such as ICESat-2, GEDI, and others
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence applications using 3DEP data
• Big data processing of 3DEP data using cloud, high performance computing and other cyberinfrastructure platforms, such as OpenTopography and CyVerse

Dr. Jason Stoker
Dr. Tyson Lee Swetnam
Mr. Christopher Crosby
Guest Editors

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