Drone LiDAR Surveys in Arkansas

In Arkansas, elevation is money in a way it isn't most places. A rice field is graded to hundredths of a foot so water runs where it's supposed to. A greentree reservoir lives or dies on whether the pool sits six inches too high in the red oaks. A duck-club levee that's four inches low at one station puts the whole impoundment on the wrong side of a spillway. A lot of the ground that matters here is under water part of the year and under hardwood canopy the rest of it.

That is the job we fly. Drone LiDAR, processed in-house, delivered in whatever your engineer works in.

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Why Arkansas is a LiDAR state

Rice. Arkansas grew more than 1.4 million acres of rice in 2024, roughly half the rice in the country. Rice is a water-management crop, and water management starts with grade. Precision leveling, zero-grade fields, and tailwater recovery systems all begin with a surface model. A current, dense bare-earth surface over a field before a leveling job tells the contractor where the cut and fill actually are, rather than where a decade-old dataset says they were.

Current acreage and production figures: University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture — Arkansas rice

Greentree reservoirs and flooded timber. This is the problem Arkansas has studied harder than anyone. At Bayou Meto, AGFC forest-health data showed red oaks under the heaviest stress in a narrow band around 178.6 to 179.5 feet MSL, and the agency responded by capping intentional flooding at 179 feet and then 178.5. Half a foot of pool elevation changed the management of hundreds of acres of timber. On a private GTR, the same question — which acres sit in the stress band, and at what pool does the water climb into them — is a bare-earth model and a flood simulation. We cover that on the flooded timber modeling page.

Current GTR management and elevation caps: AGFC — Bayou Meto WMA Habitat Project and AGFC — water management adjustments

Duck-club levees and water control. The Grand Prairie, the Cache and White River bottoms, and the lower Arkansas are dense with private impoundments — some engineered, many built by a dozer operator with a good eye forty years ago. Crowns wander, borrow ditches silt in, and nobody has a drawing. A LiDAR corridor gives you a continuous profile of the crown, both toes, and every low spot, which is the starting point for a rebuild, a raise, or a new water control structure. That workflow is on our levee surveys page.

Irrigation reservoirs and tailwater recovery. On-farm storage is how the Grand Prairie is living with a declining aquifer. Embankment design, the volume you actually get at a given pool, and the as-built check all come off the terrain.

The hills. The Ozarks and Ouachitas are steep, hollowed, and timbered; the West Gulf Coastal Plain is loblolly on rolling ground. Road layout, stream crossings, and harvest planning all want a bare-earth surface no camera can give them.

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What Arkansas already has, and why you'd fly anyway

Arkansas has a statewide high-resolution elevation dataset built through the Arkansas GIS Office and the USGS 3D Elevation Program, published as a seamless 1-meter DEM with the point clouds available through the National Map. It is good data, and for a lot of questions it is the right answer at no cost.

Coverage, vintage, and downloads: Arkansas GIS Office — statewide elevation and USGS 3DEP

Two things limit it for project work.

Density. Most of the state was collected at 3DEP's QL2 standard, on the order of two points per square meter. A drone LiDAR flight at project altitude collects hundreds. Under bottomland hardwood only a fraction of pulses reach the ground; start with two per meter and the surface under the trees is a sparse guess. Start with several hundred and it's a surface.

Date. The statewide collection was flown in blocks over a span of years, and your county's block is whatever age it is. A field leveled since, a levee raised, a reservoir built — none of that is in the public data. A drone flight is dated the day we fly it.

The honest way to use both: pull the public DEM for the watershed-scale picture, then fly the project footprint at drone density for the design.

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Why LiDAR and not photogrammetry under the trees

A camera sees the top of whatever is there. Over an open rice field in February, photogrammetry is excellent and usually cheaper, and we'll tell you so. Over a bottomland hardwood GTR or a timbered levee corridor, it produces a very good model of the canopy and nothing about the dirt.

LiDAR fires enough pulses that some find gaps and return off the ground. Those returns get classified out and used to build the bare-earth surface. That's the whole trick, and it's the same drone LiDAR workflow we fly everywhere — it just matters more in Arkansas because so much of the ground you care about is under willow oak, Nuttall oak, and overcup.

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What we deliver

Whatever your engineer, surveyor, or leveling contractor works in:

• Classified LAS/LAZ point cloud — ground, vegetation, water, structures
• Bare-earth DTM and DSM as GeoTIFF
• Contours at any interval, in DWG/DXF or shapefile
• Orthomosaic flown on the same mission
• Volumetrics — cut/fill against a design surface, stockpiles, reservoir capacity at any pool
• Flood-extent and depth maps at the pool elevations you pick
• PDF sheets for the file, the board, or the NRCS office

Everything is processed in-house, not shipped to a subcontractor and pulled off a template. If your designer wants breaklines along the levee crown, a specific coordinate system, or contours at a tenth, that's a conversation, not a change order.

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Accuracy — the honest version

We run an RTK base station on every mapping mission, set ground control points when the job calls for it, and collect independent checkshots so the deliverable comes with a number instead of a promise.

The tightest vertical accuracy comes on open ground with proper ground control — rice fields, pasture, cleared reservoir sites, and levee crowns fall in that category — and we report the checkshot numbers so your engineer can see what the surface actually holds.

Under heavy canopy it degrades. Fewer pulses reach the ground, and the bare-earth surface is built from a thinner sample; dense evergreen cover is the hardest case. That is physics, not a settings problem. Leaf-off is the right time to fly hardwood bottoms. We'll tell you up front what your site and budget will support rather than quote a figure that doesn't hold once we're over your timber.

Paragon Aerial Solutions is not a licensed surveying firm. We collect and process aerial data. Boundary surveys, plats, and any sealed document are the work of an Arkansas-licensed Professional Surveyor or Professional Engineer under the Arkansas Board of Licensure for Professional Engineers and Professional Surveyors. We're clear about where our deliverable ends and theirs begins.

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Who calls us in Arkansas

Duck clubs and landowners planning a GTR renovation, a new impoundment, or a levee rebuild, who want to know what floods at what elevation before the dozer shows up.

Farmers, ag consultants, and irrigation designers ahead of a leveling or zero-grade job, or sizing a reservoir and tailwater system.

Civil engineers who need existing conditions at real density over ground a crew can't walk efficiently.

Land surveyors who want topo at drone density and will put their own seal on the boundary and the plat.

Foresters and timber companies laying out roads, crossings, and harvest units in the Ozarks, Ouachitas, and the pine belt.

Some of them also have us fly construction progress once the dirt starts moving, or a drone deer survey on the same tract in winter. Same crew, same trailer.

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Getting on the schedule

We're based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and we travel to Arkansas with our own FAA Part 107 pilots, our own fleet, and a 24-foot mobile command trailer with a UTV on board — insured, and not a contractor network. We have flown more than 53,000 acres of LiDAR, mapping, and site work in the last 12 months alone — more acres with LiDAR drones than just about any company in the South.

Send us a boundary — onX link, KML, shapefile, or a marked-up map — and tell us what the engineer needs on the other end. We'll come back with what we can hit on your site, what control it'll take, and a price.

Call or text (205) 394-6256.