Very High Resolution Airborne Lidar at Strathalbyn in Queensland, Australia

An area of severe erosion on the Strathalbyn property near the Burdekin River in North Queensland was captured by ARA - Airborne Research Australia on 5 Sep 2017 using a Riegl Q680i-S Lidar (1064nm) mounted on one of ARA's research motorgliders. The aim was to test what the highest achievable resolution of such airborne lidar would be by flying several overlapping grids with narrow linespacing (50m and 100m) at 250m AGL. Achieved point densities are between 100 and 200 points per sqm. 8cm pixel size aerial RGB imagery is also available. The data consist of two sites (Site 1 and Site 2) which are 0.767sqkm and 2.297sqkm in size, respectively. The project is a collaboration between the Australian NESP (National Environmental Science Program) Project 3.1.7 "Gully rehabilitation" (http://nesptropical.edu.au/index.php/round-3-projects/project-3-1-7/) and ARA who also jointly funded the data capture and processing. It is important to understand that due to the nature of the terrain and the much higher point densities achieved, standard point classification will not yield the desired results in a perfect manner. Research on this data set is ongoing at the two partner organizations. Third Party users of this data set are encouraged to contact the project team via jorg.hacker@airborneresearch.org.au.