Drone LiDAR Surveys in Alabama
Based in Tuscaloosa. Most of the state is under trees — that is the point.
Alabama is a hard state to map from the air with a camera. Most of it is under trees. Paragon Aerial Solutions flies drone LiDAR out of Tuscaloosa, and we have flown more acres with LiDAR drones than just about any company in the South — 53,000-plus acres of LiDAR, mapping, and site work in the last 12 months alone, across timber, river bottoms, mine ground, and construction sites. Most of those acres had canopy on them. The bare-earth surfaces came out anyway.
Why Alabama is a LiDAR state
Alabama has about 23.1 million acres of forestland, third in timberland acreage among the lower 48, and roughly 93% of it is privately owned. That is not a footnote for a mapping company. It means the typical Alabama project — a timber tract, a hunting property, a pipeline easement, a borrow pit, a subdivision going into a cutover — sits under trees, and the ground somebody needs to design against is not visible from above.
Current figures: Alabama Forestry Commission — Alabama Forest Facts. Acreage and ownership numbers shift with each inventory cycle.
The terrain compounds it. The Black Belt is flat and open until you hit the creek bottoms, and the creek bottoms are where the drainage questions live. The Cumberland Plateau and the Appalachian foothills — Winston, Cullman, Blount, DeKalb, up through the Ridge and Valley — are steep, broken, and timbered, with elevation swings of several hundred feet inside a single tract. North Alabama has active and reclaimed surface mines, quarries, and aggregate pits that need volumes on a schedule. Pipeline and transmission corridors cut across all of it. The Tennessee-Tombigbee, the Black Warrior, and the Alabama River run through wide bottoms full of old sloughs, relic ditches, and private levees. West Alabama is catfish and ag-pond country. And Huntsville, Birmingham, and Auburn are turning timber and pasture into pads and streets faster than the public elevation data can keep up.
Every one of those is a job where the elevation that matters is under something — canopy, brush, a stockpile — and a bare-earth model is the deliverable that actually gets used.
What already exists: USGS 3DEP and the Alabama statewide LiDAR
You do not have to hire anyone to get LiDAR of Alabama. The USGS 3D Elevation Program has been assembling nationwide coverage at Quality Level 2 — at least 2 points per square meter, roughly 10 cm vertical accuracy on open ground — and Alabama has been flown in pieces over the past several years. The 2019 north Alabama block over Limestone, Madison, Jackson, Morgan, and Marshall counties is a typical example. It is free from The National Map and it is good data.
Current coverage and specs: USGS 3DEP — Alabama summary and the 2019 North Alabama lidar metadata. 3DEP runs on a planned 8-year acquisition cycle, so check the collection date for your specific area.
Here is what it is not. It is not current — a county's vintage may be anywhere from a couple of years to most of a decade old, and in a state clearing and grading as fast as Alabama is, the ground has moved. And it is not dense. Two points per square meter is a fine regional surface. It is not a design surface for a levee, a pond, a haul road, or a pad, and it will not tell you what a stockpile measured last Tuesday.
A project-scale drone flight collects hundreds of points per square meter, flown the week you need it, with an RTK base on site and control tied to your engineer's datum. Use the free data to scope the job. Use ours to build it.
Why LiDAR and not photogrammetry under canopy
Photogrammetry builds a surface from overlapping photos. If the photos show pine tops, the surface is pine tops. On an open Black Belt field or a graded site it is excellent and usually cheaper, and we fly plenty of it.
LiDAR fires laser pulses downward. Most hit vegetation. Some find gaps and return off the actual dirt. Those ground returns get classified out and the bare-earth surface is built from them. That is the whole difference, and it is why LiDAR is the tool for timbered tracts, wooded corridors, brushy cutovers, and river bottoms. It is the same drone LiDAR workflow we fly on every mapping job.
Where it is not the answer: hardwood so dense at leaf-on that almost nothing reaches the ground, or standing water, which absorbs the pulse. We will say so before we fly.
What we deliver
Whatever your engineer or surveyor works in:
- Classified LAS/LAZ point cloud — ground, vegetation, buildings, water
- Bare-earth DTM and DSM as GeoTIFF rasters
- Contours at any interval — one-foot, half-foot, whatever the design needs
- Orthomosaic flown on the same mission
- Volumetrics — stockpiles, pits, cut/fill against a design surface
- DWG/DXF surfaces, contours, and breaklines
- Shapefiles and PDF exhibit sheets
Everything is processed in-house, not subcontracted. If you need a specific coordinate system or breaklines pulled a certain way, that is a conversation, not a change order.
On accuracy — the honest version
We run an RTK base station on every mapping mission. When the job calls for it, we set ground control points and collect independent checkshots so the delivered surface has a measured accuracy statement, not an assumed one.
The tightest vertical accuracy comes on open ground with proper ground control, and we report the checkshot numbers so your engineer can see what the surface actually holds. Under heavy canopy it degrades, because fewer pulses reach the ground and the surface is built from a thinner sample. Dense evergreen cover — closed-canopy loblolly, cedar thickets — is the hardest case. That is a physical limit, not a settings problem.
We will tell you what your site will support before we quote. If the project needs tighter numbers than the conditions allow, the answer is more control and denser flight lines, priced honestly, rather than a surface your engineer cannot rely on.
Alabama's licensing rule, and where our work stops
Alabama regulates land surveying under Title 34, Chapter 11 of the Code. Work that establishes property lines, boundaries, easements, or monuments — and the plats and sealed documents that come out of it — is the practice of land surveying, and it belongs to a licensed Alabama Professional Land Surveyor. Design documents get sealed by a licensed Professional Engineer.
Current statute: Code of Alabama § 34-11-1, definitions, administered by the Alabama Board of Licensure for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors.
Paragon is not a licensed surveying firm. We collect and process aerial data. We deliver the point cloud, the terrain model, the contours, and the volumes that a PLS or PE designs from, checks against, and certifies. Alabama surveyors and engineers hire us for exactly that reason — we replace the crew walking cross sections through a bottom, not the stamp. We are clear about where our deliverable ends and theirs begins.
Who calls us in Alabama
Civil engineers who need existing conditions on a wooded site before design starts.
Land surveyors who want dense topo under canopy without sending a crew through it.
Foresters and timber companies mapping drainage, road layout, SMZs, and harvest planning across large tracts.
Mining and aggregate operations needing monthly stockpile volumes and pit progress, and reclamation contractors documenting regraded ground.
Oil, gas, and pipeline operators mapping corridors and easements through timber.
Landowners and hunting properties building levees or duck impoundments — our levee surveys and flooded timber modeling use the bare-earth model to show what acreage floods at each pool elevation before you move dirt.
Contractors and developers tracking construction progress on sites around Huntsville, Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Auburn.
If you also manage deer on the property, the same trailer runs our drone deer surveys in winter. Different sensor, same team.
Getting on the schedule — based in Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa puts most of Alabama inside a half-day drive, and the fleet, the 24-foot mobile command trailer, and the UTV go wherever the site is. Our pilots are our own — FAA Part 107, insured, not a contractor network — so the people who fly your tract are the people who process it.
Send us a boundary — an onX share link, a KML, a shapefile, or a marked-up map — and tell us what your engineer or surveyor needs: coordinate system, contour interval, control requirements, and what the data is for. We will come back with a quote and a date.
Call or text (205) 394-6256.
Map a Alabama project
Send your boundary (onX link, KML or shapefile) and what your engineer needs — coordinate system, contour interval, control — and we will come back with what the site will support and a price.