PrintKarl Heidemann
Spring 2 (Feb - May)
Educated in geography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of South Carolina, Mr. Heidemann began his career in geoscience as a GIS specialist in water resource management and FEMA floodplain mapping at HSM&M and then at Woolpert. Continuing from there as GIS Manager at EarthData International of NC, he entered the lidar field in 1999, building the lidar department and processes, preparing the company for the first-ever statewide lidar mapping program in 2001. While at EarthData, Karl refined processes for lidar data calibration, automated classification, surface generation, and data management. His contributions there further included development of an automated process for direct-from-lidar land cover classification, and algorithms for derivation of 3D hydrologic breaklines - the core of which remain the foundation for current industry software.
Joining the USGS at EROS in 2008, Mr. Heidemann revamped data lidar data ingest and distribution for the CLICK portal, and supported numerous collection and scientific efforts including a national collection for El Salvador. He played a leading role in the integration of lidar- derived data into the NED, developing the standards for hydro-flattening topographic DEMs. He has been a leading advocate of a USGS migration from traditional quad-based tiling to a CONUS- based Cartesian system more suitable for seamless lidar data management.
Karl is a long-standing and active member of ASPRS, having served on numerous committees across multiple divisions and chairing the Lidar Committee until its conversion to a Division. He currently serves as the Chair of the Lidar Certification Review Committee. Mr. Heideman has been a contributor to major industry publications including the ASPRS DEM Users' Manual, 3 rd Edition and the ASPRS Manual of Airborne Topographic Lidar. He co-authored the 2014 ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards for Digital Geospatial Data. He has conducted innumerable workshops and classes in lidar in both the public and private sectors.
Mr. Heidemann is best known as the author of the USGS-NGP Lidar Base Specification (LBS), originally introduced in 2010, published in 2012, and revised in 2014 and 2018. This seminal document provided the first lidar guidance centered on the primacy of the point cloud as source data, opening the way for consistent use of lidar data for extra-DEM applications, and establishing data handling practices that substantially improve capacity for cross-collection, multi-vendor, multi-instrument data analysis. Beyond its use for NGP-funded collections, the LBS has become the base of countless collection contracts, federal agencies, state and local standards, and national specifications for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, El Salvador, and others.
Contact Information:
Karl Heidemann
Instructor, Dutton e-Education Institute
Pennsylvania State University
2217 Earth-Engineering Sciences
University Park, PA 16802
- Phone: 814-689-9007
- Email: hkheidemann@psu.edu