Research at Berkeley on airborne laser mapping began with a survey with a first generation commercial system in 1997, which revealed the startling improvement in topographic detail that laser mapping can provide.

        The first NCALM project at Berkeley has been the analysis of 1000 km 2 of data collected for the Napa River watershed in California. This is the river valley famous for its wine production, and motivation for the survey was derived for concerns about landuse effects on aquatic resources. While the acquisition of the data and initial data reduction has been supported by a Cal-Fed grant, NCALM has provided support to organize that data for storage, archiving and distribution.
        The data were collected in May 2003 with additional coverage, focusing on river corridors in October 2003. For large portions of the valley, data density of estimated ground surface averages nearly 1 m. The data will be used to characterize many attributes of the landscape including: channel network extent, channel slopes, bed morphology, estimated median bed grain size, reservoir location and size, and landslide characteristics. A 10 ft grid has been created that will be used by various agencies and their consultants for spatial analysis and for numerical modeling of hydrology, erosion and river environments.

        Another project was flown in late June 2004 and obtained coverage for about 180 km2 of the South Fork Eel River in Northern California. This is being done to support research by the NSF sponsored Science and Technology Center known as the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics. Results of a previous lidar flight over a portion of the area (roughly 4 to 5 m data spacing) is compared to the 30 m data in the Figure 3. The South Fork Eel lidar data was used to generate hi-resolution canopy and bare-earth digital elevation models (Figure 4).