USGS 3DEP LiDAR-derived terrain
Bare-earth elevation that sees through the canopy.
The USGS 3D Elevation Program publishes airborne LiDAR scans of the United States, processed to bare-earth elevation, canopy height, and derived layers at 10m and finer resolutions. It is the foundation of Bield: Hunt's terrain stack.
50
States covered
10 m → 1 m (per state)
Resolution
PMTiles · Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF
Tile format
Public domain
License
About this dataset
USGS 3DEP is the federal program collecting and publishing high-resolution LiDAR coverage of the United States. Aircraft fly grid patterns shooting pulsed lasers at the ground; the returns are processed into a digital elevation model (bare-earth, no trees) and a digital surface model (with vegetation). From those, Bield derives the slope, aspect, hillshade, canopy-height, and topographic contour layers that drive stand placement, escape-route prediction, and the rut-pressure surface in Bield: Hunt.
Because USGS publishes the underlying data, we host the derived layers ourselves rather than paying a tile vendor — the chart stack doesn't change when a vendor changes pricing, and the layers stay open-licensed.
Why we self-host
LiDAR-derived terrain is the most-requested layer in Bield: Hunt and the one most exposed to vendor pricing. Self-hosting on Hetzner with R2 backup means a 50× cost reduction vs commercial tile APIs at scale, zero rate limits, and we control the styling, contour interval, and color ramp end-to-end. Coverage and refresh stay in sync with USGS without intermediary lag.
Used in Bield
Where this dataset shows up in the apps.
Bield: Hunt
Topographic basemap
Tri-resolution contours (100ft, 40ft, 20ft) rendered per-state, hillshade-blended.
See it in HuntBield: Hunt
Best-stand intelligence
Slope, aspect, and canopy gaps combined with wind to score stand positions.
See it in HuntBield: Hunt
Escape-route prediction
Terrain pinch-points derived from elevation gradients between bedding and security cover.
See it in HuntBield: Farm
Field elevation profile
Per-field slope and aspect surface for drainage planning and erosion-risk calls.
See it in Farm
How we process it
- Source DEM rasters pulled from USGS S3 distribution and reprojected to Web Mercator at build time.
- Hillshade rendered with GDAL at three azimuths (315°, 270°, 45°) and blended for naturalism.
- Tri-resolution contour vectors generated per state via gdal_contour and served as PMTiles archives.
- Storage: Hetzner Ryzen 9 5950X with 2× 3.84 TB NVMe RAID 1 + Cloudflare R2 as off-server backup.