Educated in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of South Carolina, Karl Heidemann began his career in geoscience as a GIS specialist in water resource management and FEMA floodplain mapping at HSM&M. As GIS Manager at EarthData International of NC, he entered the lidar field in 1999.

Joining the USGS at EROS in 2008, Karl revamped data lidar data ingest and distribution for the CLICK portal, and supported numerous collection and scientific efforts. He has been a leading advocate of a USGS migration from traditional quad-based tiling to a CONUS- based Cartesian system more suitable for seamless lidar data management.

Karl is a long-standing and active member of ASPRS and currently serves as the Chair of the Lidar Certification Review Committee. He has been a contributor to major industry publications and has conducted innumerable workshops and classes in lidar in both the public and private sectors.

Karl is best known as the author of the USGS-NGP Lidar Base Specification (LBS), originally introduced in 2010 revised in 2014 and 2018. This seminal document provided the first lidar guidance centered on the primacy of the point cloud as source data, opening the way for consistent use of lidar data for extra-DEM applications, and establishing data handling practices that substantially improve capacity for cross-collection, multi-vendor, multi-instrument data analysis.