Materials

This repository contains the material for an 180 minute lidR and LAStools tutorial workshop.

This workshop was created for the 2025 Silvilaser Conference, held in Quebec City, Canada in September/October, 2025

This workshop was presented by Liam A.K. Irwin, Brent A. Murray and Sadie J.S. Russell members of the University of British Columbia Integrated Remote Sensing Studio lab.

The workshop intends to:

• Introduce users to the LAStools software and the lidR package
• Present an overview of what can be done with lidR
• Demonstrate key workflows for deriving forest inventory products from airborne laser scanning data
• 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

• We reccomend installing a recent version of R i.e. R 4.5.x
• 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 >= 4.2.1).

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, LAStools, and lidR (09:00)
• Preprocessing with LAStools (9:20)
• Reading LAS and LAZ files (09:30)
• Point Classification and filtering (9:35)
• Digital Terrain Models and Height Normalization (9:40)
• Canopy Height Models (9:50)
• Lidar Summary Metrics (9:55)
• Break (10:15-10:45)
• File Collection Processing Engine (10:45)
• Regions of Interest (11:0)
• Area Based Approach (11:10)
• Individual Tree Detection and Segmentation (11:30)
• Questions (11:50)

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

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.

LAStools

LAStools is a collection of highly efficient, batch-scriptable, multicore command line tools for processing LiDAR data. It was originally developed by Martin Isenburg and is continually developed and improved by a team at rapidlasso.

LAStools is not open-source software, but many of its powerful tools are freely avaliable to use, including those we will use in this workshop.

Other tools require a license for commercial or educational use that can be purchased from rapidlasso.

Please visit the LAStools website for more information on how to download and install the software.

The inital processing steps we will use in this workshop can be completed with the free version of LAStools, or you can make use of the pre-processed data provided in the workshop materials package.