A New View of Olde Cape Cod: How LiDAR Lights up the Landscape with Richard Heeley

Would you like to see the Cape’s landscape just as it was after the last major glacial advance, and in great detail? Richard will explore that landscape with a new technique, called LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging.  In airborne LiDAR, pulsed laser beams are transmitted from an aircraft, bounce off solid ground, and return to the detection unit. So many pulses are sent that some always pass through vegetative cover, and the remainder is filtered out.

Heeley will take a detailed look at the area in Barnstable and Sandwich that surrounds the Olde Fairgrounds Golf Course and the West Barnstable Conservation Area. He will also look at the entire area containing the moraine ridges that constitute the “backbone of Cape Cod,” from a little east of Bass River to Buzzards Bay–an area covering nearly two thirds of the Cape’s landmass.  This will provide an overview of how the Upper Cape was constructed, and the LiDAR mapping will be supplemented with topographic mapping and cross sections available online through a U.S. Geological Survey program called “the National Map.”

Richard studied geology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he completed a Master of Science degree in Hydrogeology specializing in glacial geology.