Cottonwood Lake Study Area – Digital Elevation Model with Topobathy

This dataset contains a bare earth digital elevation model (DEM), with a 0.5-square-meter (m2) cell size, of the Cottonwood Lake Study Area, Stutsman County, North Dakota. The DEM was based primarily on airborne lidar data acquired by Fugro Horizons of Rapid City, South Dakota, and made into a DEM by USGS personnel using the ArcGIS extension LP360 (QCoherent Software, 2013). Additional DEM processing to incorporate the bathymetry of study wetlands was done using survey-grade global positioning system (GPS) data collected by soundings of the bottom of each wetland. Through these steps, a continuous elevation model representing both the surrounding uplands and wetland basins was produced for the site (Mushet and Scherff 2017).