Case study · forestry & terrain
Koaia Trail: 500+ acres of LiDAR for trail design
We mapped more than 500 acres of the Koaia Trail with drone LiDAR for Chinook Landscape Architecture and the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources — delivering the bare-earth terrain to guide trail design and a tree-canopy assessment documenting current conditions across the site.
The challenge
Designing a trail through hundreds of acres of Hawaiian terrain takes more than a topo sheet. The design team needed an accurate, high-resolution picture of the ground — slope, drainage, and grade — beneath real vegetation, plus a clear record of the canopy and trees already on site to design around and protect.
What we did
We flew the corridor with drone LiDAR and processed the returns into a classified point cloud, bare-earth terrain model, and contours accurate enough to guide alignment and grading decisions. From the same flight we built a canopy height model and per-tree canopy mapping, giving DLNR and the design team a documented baseline of current conditions across the property.
The result
Chinook Landscape Architecture and Hawaiʻi DLNR received a single, coherent dataset — terrain for design and canopy for stewardship — in formats their team could take straight into the planning process, with the accuracy a public-land project demands.
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