Ground based LiDAR and its Application to the Characterisation of Fluvial Forms - Fluvial Remote Sensing for Science and Management - page 325

scans of the Wadi Nukhul in the Sinai Peninsula. This
generated a detailed structural surface model across a
12 km 2 area from which they derived geological strike
and dipmeasurements and inferred palaeo-current direc-
tion data.
These types of study remain rare, and as such we con-
clude our discussion of laser scanning in river science with
a number of studies at the landscape scale which utilise
airborne LiDAR data, demonstrating its utility at this
scale. Newer scanners offer longer range measurements
over several kilometres and these will allow similar data
sets to be generated to those reviewed below.

Aerial laser data of the floodplain of the River Ure at
Jervaux Abbey, North Yorkshire (Figure 14.12a) has been
analysed by the authors to identify floodplain palaeo-
morphology (Figure 14.12b) as well as vegetation units
(Figure 14.12c). The airborne data was supplied as a
regular 2m surface grid which contains information on
the vegetation as well as the bare earth. A second data
set provided by the EA was processed to remove the
vegetation, effectively isolating the minimum elevation
data recorded by the aerial LiDAR through a moving
window technique. This is facilitated by the nature of the
LiDAR data collection process as the footprint of the laser

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Figure 14.12 Aerial laser data of the floodplain of the River Ure at Jervaux Abbey (a), identifying floodplain palaeo-morphology (b)
and vegetation units (c). Data supplied courtesy of the UK Environment Agency.