Drone LiDAR Surveys in Georgia

Georgia already has LiDAR. Every county in the state was flown for the USGS 3D Elevation Program, and the bare-earth models are free to download. So the first honest question about a drone LiDAR survey in Georgia is: why pay for one?

The answer is that the public data was flown at roughly four points per square meter, leaf-off, in the winter of 2018–2019 for the first blocks, with the statewide program wrapping up in 2022. It meets a 10-centimeter vertical accuracy class on open ground and about 19 centimeters under vegetation. Excellent for a watershed model or a floodplain study. Not a surface you grade a subdivision from, calculate a pay quantity against, or set a spillway elevation on.

A project-scale drone flight is a different product: hundreds of points per square meter, tied to an RTK base station on site, on the date the engineer needs it, over ground that in metro Atlanta may have been cleared and re-graded twice since 2019.

Current statewide coverage, vintage and specs: Georgia Remote Sensing Program — LiDAR · USGS GA Statewide block metadata

Figures above are for the 2018–2019 blocks. Later blocks vary. Check the tile your site falls in before you rely on it.

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The Piedmont problem: red clay, steep drainage, and outward growth

Metro Atlanta does not grow up; it grows out. Cherokee, Forsyth, Paulding, Henry, Jackson, and the counties behind them are converting pasture and pine into subdivisions, distribution centers, and roads. Almost all of it is in the Piedmont — rolling saprolite hills under a skin of red clay, cut by steep, short drainages.

That terrain makes two things expensive: cut/fill balance and stormwater. A Piedmont site rarely sits flat, and the difference between a balanced site and a hauled site is a real number on the bid. Detention design runs against the existing surface, and on clay hillsides the existing surface is exactly what a sparse topo misses — the old terrace, the gully under privet, the low spot that will become the pond whether the plans say so or not.

A dense bare-earth model fixes the input. Volumes come off a measured surface. Ponds get sized against the drainage area that actually exists. That is the same drone LiDAR workflow we use on every job, and on active sites it doubles as construction progress documentation — fly it monthly and the pay quantities calculate themselves.

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Twenty-two million acres of pine

Georgia has about 22 million acres of commercially available private timberland — more than any other state (Georgia Forestry Association). Most of it is planted loblolly and slash in the Coastal Plain, in dense rows, evergreen, year-round.

That is the hardest case for aerial mapping. LiDAR gets to the ground only through gaps, and a closed 15-year-old pine stand has few gaps. There is no leaf-off season to wait for.

We still get ground returns in planted pine — enough to build a usable bare-earth surface for road layout, stream crossings, and bedding drainage. But that surface is built from a thinner sample than the open field next to it, and its accuracy is looser. We say so on the deliverable rather than pretend the tract is uniform. If you need tighter numbers under the pines — a culvert elevation, a haul-road grade — the answer is denser flight lines and more ground control, and we price that up front.

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Southwest Georgia: pivots, ponds, and the Flint

South of the Fall Line the questions change. Nearly 10,000 center pivots cover about a million acres in south Georgia, roughly half of them on the Dougherty Plain along the Flint (New Georgia Encyclopedia). Groundwater permits in the Lower Flint are tight, and every pond, land-leveling job, and pivot expansion turns into a grading and water question.

On open ag ground LiDAR is at its best. A pivot field flown with control gives a surface good enough for land leveling design, irrigation pond siting, and stage-storage curves on an existing reservoir — something the engineer can design from.

Southwest Georgia is also plantation country, and the plantations are building water. A longleaf quail property that wants a duck impoundment has a terrain question first: what floods at what elevation, and where does the levee go. That is what our flooded timber modeling and levee surveys pages cover — one flight, one bare-earth model, the flooded footprint at each pool stage before dirt moves. If you are also counting deer, our drone deer surveys run off the same boundary file.

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The Fall Line: kaolin, sand, and stockpiles

Georgia is the leading clay-producing state in the country, mining more than 8 million metric tons of kaolin a year, worth over a billion dollars, in a band from Augusta through Macon toward Columbus (New Georgia Encyclopedia). Those are open pits with reclamation obligations, and aggregate and sand operations sit along the same line.

Mining wants volumes on a schedule: pit progress, overburden moved, stockpile inventory, reclamation grading against the approved plan. A flight every month or quarter puts a measured number on each, and the point clouds stack so any two dates compare.

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Why LiDAR and not photogrammetry

For a bare pad, a pit, or a pivot field, photogrammetry is often cheaper and just as good, and we will tell you when it is. The reason to fly LiDAR in Georgia is cover. Hardwood creek bottoms, privet, kudzu, planted pine, a wooded lot not yet cleared — a camera models the top of all of it. A LiDAR sensor fires enough pulses that some find the ground, and those returns get classified out into a bare-earth surface the camera never saw.

If the design surface is under vegetation, LiDAR is the tool. If it is not, ask us which one is cheaper.

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What we deliver

Whatever your engineer works in:

• Classified LAS/LAZ point cloud
• Bare-earth DTM and DSM as GeoTIFF
• Contours at any interval
• Orthomosaic
• Cut/fill volumetrics and stockpile reports
• DWG/DXF contours and breaklines, shapefiles, and PDF sheets

Everything is processed in-house. Coordinate system, contour interval, and breakline rules are set to your specification, not a template.

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On accuracy — the honest version

Every mapping mission runs off an RTK base station on site. When the job calls for it, we set ground control points and independent checkshots and report the residuals with the deliverable.

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. Closed planted pine is the hardest case in Georgia. That is a physical limit, not a settings problem, and we would rather tell you what your site supports than quote a number that stops holding at the tree line.

Note: Paragon is not a licensed surveying firm. We collect and process aerial data. Boundary surveys, plats, and any sealed document are work for a Georgia-licensed PLS or PE, and our deliverable is built to hand off to one.

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Who calls us in Georgia

Civil engineers who need existing conditions at design density. Land surveyors adding topo under canopy to a boundary job. Developers and site contractors checking cut/fill before the bid and pay quantities after. Foresters and timber companies laying out roads and crossings. Plantation and hunting-property owners building impoundments. Mining operations tracking volumes.

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Getting on the schedule

We are based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. West Georgia is a short drive — Columbus, LaGrange, Carrollton, and the west side of metro Atlanta are routine — and the rest of the state comes with the fleet, the 24-foot mobile command trailer, and the UTV. Our pilots are FAA Part 107, insured, and ours, 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 a boundary — KML, shapefile, or an onX link — and tell us what the engineer needs: contour interval, coordinate system, and what the surface is for. We will come back with an approach and a price.

Call or text 205.394.6256.