Under its Geospatial Products and Services Contract (GPSC), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has selected Dewberry, a privately held professional services firm, to acquire and process Quality Level 1 topographic lidar for approximately 48,000 square miles across the state of Mississippi within a three-year timespan. This $12-million project supports the national 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) initiative, which provides high-quality, 3D elevation data for flood risk mapping and natural hazard modeling, infrastructure planning, environmental resource management, and other critical applications.
This project’s challenges include its large geographic extent and complex hydrography within the state’s coastal and riverine environments. To maintain data quality, Dewberry’s acquisition team is deploying river gauges to monitor water levels in real-time, continuously checking vegetation conditions on the ground, and analyzing the lidar point cloud for consistent penetration through the dense tree canopy and underlying shrub habitat. These efforts will result in a lidar density that exceeds eight points-per-square-meter. In addition, Dewberry is applying deep-learning models to support hydrographic breakline collection. These models identify intricate waterbody geometries using a combination of lidar-derived surface models and intensity imagery and can accurately detect water bodies as small as 0.25 acres.
“This automated approach produces cleaner, more consistent breaklines in significantly less time than manual compilation, allowing the team to focus on further data refinement with the lidar for the final digital elevation models,” says Dewberry Project Manager Janet Camarca. “We are proud to continue our more than 20-year partnership with USGS, helping advance the goals of the 3DEP program.”
Dewberry is actively acquiring, processing, and delivering lidar for the entire state of Mississippi. Once complete, this dataset will provide Mississippi with a high-fidelity, high accuracy lidar inventory that supports flood mitigation, coastal resilience planning, emergency management, and long-term infrastructure development.