What It Is
LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) data provide high accuracy and high resolution elevation information over very large regions. This makes LiDAR ideal for use in agricultural applications such as tile drainage, surface drainage, and 3D land forming design, as well as layers in precision agronomy programming.
However, most of the LiDAR data that are available from the Manitoba Land Initiative and other government sources cannot be used by the majority of agricultural users due to incompatible formats and difficulties processing very large data sets to extract just the fields required.
We have spent hundreds of hours sourcing, merging, and processing publically available data into more easily used formats, such as shapefile and geo-TIFF. We then split the data by section or river lot boundaries, and created packages containing the processed data for each section or river lot that LiDAR data are currently available for. We have compiled data for over 25,000 sections of land and almost 5,000 river lots! The cost represents our time and resources to source and process the data.
Available Areas
To check if other land you are interested in is covered see the map below: (or enter the legal description into the search box to search for the product listing)
What You Get
You will receive a zipped folder for each section or river lot ordered that contains a shapefile boundary, a point shapefile at 3m resolution with elevation values in feet and metres, and a Geo-TIFF file with elevation values in feet. All data are clipped to the section boundary (the road and road allowance are not included).
Orders are typically fulfilled within a few hours but please allow up to 24 hours for delivery. You will receive an email notification that the data you ordered is ready for download.
Please download a sample file here to confirm the formats and specifications meet your requirements as we cannot offer refunds once we've provided your files.
Download Sample Data
How To Use The Data
We can't provide specific instructions for each software, but if you know how to import elevation layers into your program it will be no different than usual.
In SMS and Trimble desktop software you simply read in the layers (typically you'll order shapefiles), making sure to specify that the column in the database with values is the elevation. Then, once imported, right click on the layer and choose Regenerate 3D Grid (in SMS) or Create Topographic Layer (Trimble). Other software may support Geo-TIFF and if yours does then this is the recommended format to work with.
We don't clip out features such as yard sites and dugouts, bush, lagoons, etc. When you import the data into your software, if you have field boundaries setup, the software will usually clip the data to the field boundary.