detailed lidar data to more accurately measure distance between buildings or to roads .
Langlade County is using lidar data for these reasons and more , and , with the recent incorporation of the Ayres Lidar Online web viewer , accessing critical elevation data has never been easier .
“ I think people like looking at it because of the three-dimensional appearance of our landscape ,” said Joe Martell , the County ’ s GIS coordinator and land information officer . “ As human beings , we ’ re used to looking at things in a 3-D perspective and , with this tool , we can rotate something – a building , a tree , a road , a hill , a ditch , it doesn ’ t matter what it is – you see it as if you were there . I think that ’ s kind of nice .”
Martell said he also appreciates having the tool so easily accessible – right from the County ’ s website , even from a phone .
“ The experts at Ayres or myself , we can look at that data individually , but to be able to give this tool to the public and to other stakeholders that could use this information so that they , too , can look at it and take measurements , is very valuable ,” he said .
Ayres launched the new browser-based application in early 2020 . Langlade County is one of the firm ’ s first clients to purchase the product , and many more counties and municipalities are looking to incorporate it into their 2021 budgets , said Adam Derringer , a senior project manager in Geospatial Services at Ayres .
Derringer explained the motivations for creating the intuitive new tool . Historically , important but massively sized elevation data has been difficult to access , slow to load , and hard to use .
“ If you were a novice user , say you were an administrator , highway engineer , or hydrologist , and you didn ’ t have the patience or understand what this lidar was and how valuable it was , you gave up before you ever got the value of the dataset ,” he said . “ What we wanted to do , since we produce so much of this data for counties , municipalities , and other engineering firms , was devise a solution to make lidar data easier to use and get it into the hands of an administrator , or an engineer , or someone else who needed it quickly to make a decision , which was impossible in the past .”
But that was then .
Ayres Lidar Online allows users to quickly and easily view full point clouds – terabytes of data – and measure elevation anywhere in a project area .
“ This gets difficult data , critical data , into the hands of everyone for use from
10 | TRENDS Ingenuity , Integrity , and Intelligence .