Terrain & Canopy — Northline

This is the forest as the laser saw it. Now hit Bare earth — the trees vanish and the ground appears. That is what LiDAR does that a photo cannot.

MEASURED, NOT CLAIMED

Here the ground is under a closed forest canopy — most of the laser never reaches it. Our pipeline solved bare earth from the returns that did, with the survey's own ground labels hidden and used only to grade the result.

0 cmmedian difference from the province's
own surveyed ground — under dense forest

within 13 cm	95% of terrain cells
surveyed ground points missed	0.13%
ground cells compared	582,159
this tile is	72% forest & water

WHAT THE LASER SEES

One flight returns both surfaces at once: the canopy the eye sees, and the ground beneath it — the basis for floodplain mapping, erosion tracking and canopy inventory.

laser returns in this tile	5,081,020
ground relief across the tile	27.5 m
terrain grid	1 m
tallest canopy	32.5 m
heights referenced to	CGVD2013 (in the file)

Deliverables from this one input: bare-earth terrain · full surface · canopy height · 1 m contours · classified point cloud.

Gaps are honest: over open water and at the tile edge the laser returns little, and there we draw nothing rather than invent ground. Display uses ×3 vertical exaggeration (stated on the legend) and a surface simplified to 2 m for smooth orbiting — every measurement reads the full 1 m grid. Scan-derived and intended to support expert review — not survey-grade. Demonstration data: Government of Canada CanElevation LiDAR (Muskoka acquisition, Ontario, 2018). Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. Ground solve, terrain products and measurements by Northline.