Report of the First National Lidar Initiative Meeting, February 14-16, Reston, Va.

The first National Lidar Initiative meeting was held on February 14-16, 2007 at the USGS National Center in Reston, Virginia. This meeting was a successor to a meeting held September 12, 2006 of several agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Association of American State Geologists (AASG), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). During the 2006 discussion, the USGS presented a plan to organize a meeting to discuss the feasibility and strategy of a National Lidar Initiative. Originally scheduled as a workshop to be held in June, 2007, the meeting was moved up to February to accommodate the desire of AASG to have talking points available at their Annual Meeting in March, 2007. The original workshop was recast as a meeting of representatives from Federal, State, and local government, and from private industry, to formulate a national initiative with the goal of collecting high resolution, high accuracy light detection and ranging (lidar) data for all 50 states.

The goals of the National Lidar Initiative meeting were to:

1) Identify government staff with all scales of applications who are willing to help devise a potential national strategy and communicate the initiative throughout the lidar community.

2) Identify points of contact for future meetings, information exchanges, and design teams.

3) Compose a document explaining the need of a consistent national lidar dataset.

4) Identify champions of this idea who would be willing to work toward funding this effort.

This report is intended to summarize the views expressed by the invited speakers and the participant's discussions on a National Lidar Initiative. It is not intended to be a comprehensive document on the technical aspects of lidar, what lidar can be used for, or the state of the art in lidar technology, although many of these aspects do come through in the views of the presenters.