LiDAR or laser altimetry is a valuable technology used for mapping all sorts of things ranging from building heights to flood zones to timber volumes. I've used LiDAR a lot in my own work, and I believe that it is moving beyond a new cool tool to a critical piece of data infrastructure. In fact, a lot of remote sensing products rely strongly on LiDAR. As a state we need to be thinking about investing in LiDAR data if we want to solve the 21st century problems that all of the other states are solving.
