Download and Access Products:

Point Cloud Data		opentopoID: OTLAS.112026.32616.1
Raster Data		opentopoID: OTSDEM.112026.32616.1

Collection Overview:

This dataset provides a new bare-earth reprocessing of 234 airborne lidar transects over the Yucatan Peninsula Mexico. NASA Goddard's Lidar, Hyperspectral and Thermal (G-LiHT) airborne imager acquired the transects in April - May 2013 for the AMIGA-Carb campaign. They were flown at about 335 m above ground with a Riegl VQ-480 scanning lidar (1550 nm, 300 kHz).

NASA's original ground classification misclassified many returns beneath dense tropical forest canopy. For this dataset, every NASA classification was discarded and ground was classified again from scratch. The new classification used TerraScan's adaptive TIN ground routine with NCALM-derived parameters (Fernandez-Diaz; Estrada-Belli et al. 2025): maximum building size 70 m, terrain angle 88°, iteration angle 9° and iteration distance 3.0 m. Returns within ±0.20 m of that surface were kept as near-ground (class 8).

NASA's ground-filtered DTMs for these transects were published at 1 m per pixel, although the ground returns are dense enough to support finer grids. This dataset therefore rasterizes the reprocessed ground surfaces at 33 cm, 50 cm and 100 cm.

The dataset has three parts:

Lidar ground points: 234 LAZ 1.4 files, classes 2 and 8 only. NASA's complete point clouds remain available from the G-LiHT data portal and are not redistributed here.
• DTMs: Compressed, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs, kriged from those points at nominal 0.33 m, 0.5 m and 1 m (20 m search radius). A 21 m strip along every transect edge is set to no-data, to remove interpolation artifacts.
• G1 composite Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs. Each blends multidirectional hillshade, slope, positive openness and sky-view factor, following Britton et al. 2025, and was designed for detecting ancient Maya features.

The reprocessed surfaces underlie a regional detection catalog of 57,181 ancient Maya structures (Benjamin Jay Britton, 2026).

Dataset Notes:

• This dataset has been split based on UTM zone. The western, UTM 15N portion of the dataset is available here.
• DTMs at 33 cm and 1 m, as well as G1 rasters (at 0.33, 0.5, and 1 m resolutions) are available for download in the bulk download section

Dataset Acknowledgement: Source lidar was acquired by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's G-LiHT program (AMIGA-Carb campaign, NASA Carbon Cycle Science). Reprocessing was supported in part by the University of Cincinnati Bearcat AI Grant Program (award UC_BearcatAI_2025)

Dataset Citation: Britton, B. (2026). G-LiHT Yucatan East 2013: Reprocessed Ground Points, DEMs and Visualizations. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center G-LiHT (G-LiHT). [Dataset]. Distributed by OpenTopography. https://doi.org/10.5069/G9TH8JX9. Accessed 2026-11-04       Copied to Clipboard

Use License: CC BY 4.0

Dataset Keywords: lidar; G-LiHT; Yucatan; Maya archaeology; bare-earth DEM; ground classification; tropical forest; relief visualization; Campeche; Chiapas

Survey Date: 04/01/2013 - 05/31/2013

Publication Date: 11/04/2026

Data Provider and Roles:
Funders

• University of Cincinnati Bearcat AI Grant Program
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collector

• NASA Goddard Space Flight Center G-LiHT

Principal Investigator

• Benjamin Britton - University of Cincinnati

Total Number of Points: 2,541,505,312 pts

Area: 572.93 km²

Point Density: 4.44 pts/m²

Classifications:

Class 2 - Ground	1,454,893,075
Class 8 - Model Key/Reserved	1,086,612,237

Raster Resolution: 0.5 meter

Coordinate System:
Horizontal: WGS84 / UTM Zone 16N Meters [EPSG: 32616]
Vertical: WGS84 (EGM96 GEOID) [EPSG: 5773]

Units: meter

Survey Report: Reports

LAS Validation Data Report: Reports

Tile Index in Shapefile Format: Download

Dataset Boundary in GeoJSON Format:
Point Cloud: MX13E_Britton.geojson
Raster: MX13E_Britton.geojson

Dataset Extent (Bounding Box): North: 21.510151°     South: 18.338057°     East: -87.307469°     West: -89.906494°