Canopy Height Model, individual tree detection, timber volume estimation, carbon stock MRV, and fire-risk fuel mapping — generated automatically from your LiDAR acquisitions.
Field plots are expensive and statistical. Wall-to-wall LiDAR inventory is technically possible but operationally hard — the processing pipeline trips up most internal GIS teams.
867M acres of US forest under FIA monitoring scope
Field plot inventory only samples 0.05% of stand area
Multi-vendor CHM workflows rarely re-run beyond first delivery
Carbon market MRV requires repeatable, auditable biomass estimates
Fourteen forestry workflows from raw LAZ to canopy height model, biomass estimate, and harvest-plan terrain intelligence.
| Workflow | Name & what it automates | Time saved |
|---|---|---|
| #49 | Canopy Height Model (DEM/DSM/CHM) Three GeoTIFFs in one pass — bare-earth DEM, DSM, and CHM/nDSM — from classified point cloud | — |
| #07 | LiDAR Classification Ground / non-ground / vegetation classification across 12-stage WhiteboxTools pipeline | — |
| #48 | LiDAR Merge + COPC Multi-format ingest, merge, and COPC LAZ export for streaming into web viewers | — |
| #127 | Individual Tree Detection Local-maxima crown detection from CHM with species-specific minimum spacing | — |
| #129 | Timber Volume Estimation Allometric biomass and stem-volume model with field-plot calibration | — |
| #131 | Carbon Stock MRV Pack Above-ground biomass + carbon stock with confidence intervals for credit certification | — |
| #133 | Fire Fuel Mapping Canopy bulk density + ladder-fuel classification feeding FlamMap / FARSITE | — |
| #275 | Deforestation Alert Near-real-time forest loss detection from Sentinel-2 with email alerting | — |
| #33 | NDVI Vegetation Index Multi-temporal NDVI for stand health and post-harvest revegetation tracking | — |
| #41 | Slope Classification Terrain slope for harvest operability and skid-trail planning | — |
Modeled on a private timber owner managing 1M acres with biennial LiDAR acquisition and annual harvest planning cycles.
| Metric | Manual / current tooling | GeoDataConverter |
|---|---|---|
| CHM generation per 100K acres | 2–3 weeks | Hours |
| Individual tree detection per 100K acres | Not feasible | Standard output |
| Carbon MRV report cycle | Quarterly | On demand |
| Fire fuel map refresh | Annual | Per acquisition |
Workflow #49 is the most-used workflow in our forestry deployments because it produces all three forest-inventory primitives — bare-earth DEM, digital surface model, and canopy height model — from classified LiDAR in a single execution. Same coordinate system, same tiling scheme, same metadata. No pipeline-stitching required to feed them into your inventory model.
Send us a LAZ tile set covering up to 100,000 acres. We'll classify, generate DEM/DSM/CHM, run individual tree detection, and produce a per-stand inventory summary.