Lidar for North Dakota: farms, floods and landslides in 3D

North Dakota now has complete statewide lidar — laser-measured 3D elevation — from the U.S. Geological Survey's 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), free for anyone to download. A national assessment conservatively valued it at $12.39 million a year to the state, nearly two-thirds of it in farming.

3DEP coverage of North Dakota, March 2026: complete. USGS.

Why a flat state needs elevation data

North Dakota is the northernmost Great Plains state, split into two landscapes by the Missouri River. Agriculture is its biggest industry; natural resources — oil and gas above all, then mining — are the fastest growing and now the largest part of its economy. Both depend on knowing exactly how the ground lies.

Farming by the inch

Nearly 7,500 North Dakota farms, from the smallest to the largest, used precision farming in 2022. Lidar feeds the models behind it — nutrient and sediment runoff, erosion hot spots, sunlight — and guides where to lay drainage tile.

Floods

Snowmelt and ice jams bring major floods on the Red, Souris, Missouri, James and other rivers, and the state expects to spend more than $300 million on flood control between 2025 and 2027. Lidar underlies FEMA's Base Level Engineering flood models where detailed maps do not exist. After the catastrophic Red River flood of 1997, North Dakota, Minnesota and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began the Fargo–Moorhead Area Diversion Project, due for completion in 2027, to steer floodwater around Fargo and West Fargo — a project that could only be designed with detailed elevation data.

Landslides and minerals

Landslides are a recurring hazard in river valleys with unstable subsoils, and many are hard to see in aerial photographs. Lidar finds and tracks them: in the Killdeer Mountains of western North Dakota, a lidar shaded-relief map shows far more landslides than 1958 aerial photographs of the same slopes (Moxness, 2022). The state's critical-minerals programme also uses it, with aerial imagery, to estimate the depth of mineral beds that drilling cannot easily reach.

The data

3DEP's minimum standard, quality level 2, means at least two laser returns per square metre and a vertical error of no more than 10 centimetres; the products are point clouds and bare-earth elevation models at 1 metre or finer, free and unrestricted on The National Map. Nationally the programme is conservatively worth $690 million a year. Governments and companies can join through the USGS's annual Data Collaboration Announcement to fund projects, contribute data, or buy higher-quality coverage.

Sources

Written from The 3D Elevation Program—Supporting North Dakota's economy, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2026–3006, a work of the United States government in the public domain; benefit estimates are from the National Enhanced Elevation Assessment (Dewberry, 2012).