Current status: Answered by Gillian Martin on 3 September 2026
To ask the Scottish Government what use it currently makes of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology to map vegetation, assess fuel loads and identify areas at heightened risk of wildfire.
The Scottish Government’s land LiDAR programme is currently in progress and will provide the first full national land LiDAR dataset for Scotland. A number of research projects have been commissioned and are currently in progress that are making use of the new LiDAR data for the purposes of vegetation mapping and wildfire risk assessment.
A project funded via the Scottish Government’s Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture (ENRA) research programme and led by Forest Research is developing methodologies to map vegetation structure and biomass in forests, hedgerows and trees outside woodlands using LiDAR data. A fellowship is also underway with the University of Edinburgh that is exploring how LiDAR data can be used to estimate fuel loads to better inform wildfire risk assessment.