The availability of LiDAR data is expanding at a rate that is out-pacing the requisite knowledge and skills needed to effectively utilize the data. Sounds like a cart-before-the-horse analogy, to coin an idiom from a bygone era.
This conundrum first came to our attention a couple of years ago when, during a roundtable discussion at a GIS forum in one of our neighboring New England states, a local government official excitedly announced that her town had just received LiDAR (or leader, to use her exact pronunciation) from the state. She went on to confide that she wasn’t entirely sure what LiDAR was but evidently that did not dampen her excitement. Remarkably, several other forum delegates jumped on the bandwagon, to use another obsolete transportation-based analogy, and shared their enthusiasm at having received data for their town while eagerly awaiting instructions from the same state agency on what to do next. ......continued ...