September 4, 2026 · LiDAR, Drone Surveyor, Surveying

Cross-section through a drone LiDAR point cloud: ground returns in tan, vegetation returns in green, showing tree crowns standing above a forested ridge

What a Drone LiDAR Survey Actually Delivers

A LiDAR survey produces a lot more than a picture of the ground. Here is what actually lands in your inbox afterward, and what each file is for.

The point cloud is the master. Everything else is derived.

A LiDAR sensor does not produce a map. It produces measurements — tens of millions of them on a typical site. Each one is a coordinate with an elevation, a return intensity, and after processing, a classification: this point is ground, this one is vegetation, this one is a structure.

The image at the top of this post is a vertical slice a few metres wide through a point cloud. Tan points are ground. Green points are everything the laser hit on the way down — tree crowns, branches, brush. Every deliverable below is computed from points like these, which is why the classified point cloud itself is always the first thing PCI delivers.

The six core deliverables

Top-down view of a classified LiDAR point cloud, ground returns in tan and vegetation returns in green, over a mix of forest and open ground

1. The classified point cloud

Every measurement, classified: ground, vegetation, structure. Tan is ground the laser reached; green is canopy that never let it through. In open ground almost every pulse finds the surface. Under dense canopy only a fraction do — but a fraction of tens of millions is still plenty to build a surface from. This is the master dataset everything else is derived from.

Delivered as: LAS / LAZ

Hillshaded bare-earth terrain model from drone LiDAR: a road grade crossing wetland, with drainage lines and microtopography visible

2. The bare-earth terrain model

Ground points only, gridded into a surface: the digital terrain model. It shows the ground as it would look with every tree removed, and reveals what neither a photo nor a walk through the willows would — old drainage lines, subtle terraces, the true edge of a road fill. The deliverable engineers and geologists usually want most.

Delivered as: GeoTIFF · Civil 3D surface · LandXML

One-metre contours generated from a drone LiDAR bare-earth surface, draped over a hillshade, with index contours every five metres

3. Contours

The terrain model translated into the language of drawings, at whatever interval the project needs: one metre for a site like this, half a metre on a building site, five metres on a mine. Because they come from a measured surface rather than interpolated spot heights, they hold up on the steep ground where a design either fits or does not.

Delivered as: DWG / DXF, index contours labelled and layered

Canopy height model from drone LiDAR, coloured from pale for open ground to dark green for the tallest trees

4. The canopy height model

Subtract the ground from the top of canopy and every tree on the site gets a height. Pale is open ground; the darkest green is the tallest timber. Clearing estimates, line-of-sight checks, powerline vegetation clearance, riparian assessments — anything that needs to know how tall the trees are, across the whole site, without a cruise crew walking it.

Delivered as: GeoTIFF

Slope map derived from a LiDAR terrain model: flat ground in green, moderate slopes in yellow, steep banks and gullies in red

5. Slope and terrain analysis

Once the terrain model exists, terrain analysis is a matter of asking it questions. Green is flat, yellow is moderate, red is steep: a road alignment picks itself, a pad location becomes obvious, and the gullies that would swallow an excavator show up before anyone mobilizes one. Aspect, drainage and cut-and-fill against a design surface come from the same model.

Delivered as: GeoTIFF rasters

High-resolution drone orthophoto of open wetland with pools and channels, bordered by forest

6. The orthophoto

PCI flies a camera alongside the LiDAR, so the same flight also produces a georeferenced orthophoto at a few centimetres per pixel. It is the deliverable everyone on the project can read without training, and overlaid on the terrain model it puts the photo and the measurement in the same coordinate space.

Delivered as: GeoTIFF

The accuracy report

Every package also includes a processing and accuracy report: the control used, the checkpoint results and the accuracy achieved. That is not a formality. Every PCI LiDAR flight is tied to GNSS control and validated against independent checkpoints, and the report says exactly how well the data fits — so the accuracy your design assumes is an accuracy that was measured.

See it for yourself

The fastest way to understand a point cloud is to move around inside one. Our interactive LiDAR demo loads 2.6 million measured points from a real PCI flight in your browser. For the field side of the work, read drone LiDAR surveying in the Yukon; for the service itself, see drone LiDAR and drone mapping and photogrammetry.

Get a price for a LiDAR flight

Outline the area on the map, tell us which of the deliverables above you need and when, and you will usually see a price as soon as you submit. Remote site? Say so, and the mobilization is planned into the quote.

Request a quote or call the office nearest your project. Crews are out seven days a week, 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.