Materials

This repository contains the material for an 80 minute lidR tutorial workshop.

This workshop was created for the 2025 Living Planet Symposium (LPS), 2025 held in Wien, Austria June, 2025

This workshop was presented by Liam A.K. Irwin, Brent A. Murray and Nicholas C. Coops members of the University of British Columbia Integrated Remote Sensing Studio lab.

The workshop intends to:

• Present an overview of what can be done with lidR
• Give users an understanding of how lidR may fit their needs
• Exercises will be done depending on available time - users are encouraged to work on these after the workshop!

Find the code, exercises, and solutions used in the .\R directory.

Requirements

R version and Rstudio

• You need to install a recent version of R i.e. R 4.0.x or newer.
• We will work with Rstudio. This IDE is not mandatory to follow the workshop but is highly recommended.

R Packages

You need to install the lidR package in its latest version (v >= 4.0.0).

install.packages("lidR")

To run all code in the tutorial yourself, you will need to install the following packages. You can use lidR without them, however.

libs <- c("geometry","viridis","future","sf","gstat","terra","mapview","mapedit","concaveman","microbenchmark")

install.packages(libs)

Estimated schedule

• Introduction to Lidar and lidR (09:00)
• Reading LAS and LAZ files (09:10)
• Point Classification and filtering (9:15)
• Digital Terrain Models and Height Normalization (9:25)
• Canopy Height Models (9:35)
• Lidar Summary Metrics (9:50)
• File Collection Processing Engine (10:10)

Resources

We strongly recommend having the following resources available to you:

• The lidR official documentation
• The lidRbook of tutorials

When working on exercises:

• Stack Exchange with the lidR tag

Additional Resources

• Silvilaser 2023 lidR tutorial - Forest Inventory Focused

lidR

lidR is an R package to work with lidar data developed at Laval University (Québec). It was developed & continues to be maintained by Jean-Romain Roussel and was made possible between:

• 2015 and 2018 thanks to the financial support of the AWARE project NSERC CRDPJ 462973-14; grantee Prof. Nicholas C. Coops.

• 2018 and 2021 thanks to the financial support of the Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs (Québec).

• 2021 and 2024 thanks to the financial support of Laval University.

The current release version of lidR can be found on CRAN and source code is hosted on GitHub.

[!NOTE] Since 2024, the lidR package is no longer supported by Laval University, but the software will remain free and open-source. r-lidar has transitioned into a company to ensure sustainability and now offers independent services for training courses, consulting, and development. Please feel free to visit their website for more information.