Detail Abstract

Nation-wide Water and Natural Resources Inventory in the Philippines using LiDAR Mapping

Abstract

Signs of changing climate are already evident in the Philippines as shown in the increasing temperature trends, sea level rise and extreme climate event occurrences. That is why in recent years, earth surface height data has become a vital component of many geospatial planning strategies and is widely used by government agencies and the commercial sector for a variety of applications from flood risk modeling to urban development. The coverage and accuracy of topographic data extracted by such system, complemented by the features detected by an onboard digital aerial camera, provides rich information that would greatly benefit agencies using spatial data.<br> The Philippines is recently using new spatial data acquisition system, Light Intensity Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), as a rapid geospatial data acquisition system. It also produced detailed resource maps for the country using LiDAR for various applications such as – production and vulnerability of high value crops, irrigation assessment, aquaculture production, forest protection and spatial distribution, and discovery of renewable energy sources. Nowadays, the system not only produced robust datasets in a wide range condition but also presents complementary or even alternative solutions to the acquisition of spatial information unanswered by existing technologies such as aerial photography or satellite imagery.