A survey on the need for airborne lidar training
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Two questionnaires were sent out to over 600 members of the international lidar academic research and commercial mapping community, and a lidar research and training workshop was hosted in Halifax, Canada. The purpose of the questionnaires and the workshop was to better understand the status of, and needs for training within the lidar community. The results demonstrate that there is a clear need for training within both the end user and service provider sectors of the professional lidar community. It is speculated that although specific training needs differ, in terms of volume the end user community's need is at least an order of magnitude greater than in the service provider sector. Regarding training priorities, there appears to be some clear stratification between the needs of end users and service providers. In general, practical experience and "hands on" training methods were considered more useful for those entering into lidar related employment, but this perception was not shared by academics. Also, results indicated that "end user applications" were the priority topic in the end user academic and government communities, while in the lidar industry, training priorities were related to more technical and operational topics such as "data processing" and "project management." Within the lidar project workflow, six areas of responsibility were identified within the end user and service provider sectors (service provider operators, data processors, and project managers; and end user clients, project managers, and data processors), each of which having different training needs. The results of this study are being used by the Applied Geomatics Research Group to develop a suite of lidar training curricula from workshop seminars to industry-sponsored project-based internship programs. 2007 American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
