Drivers of Lidar Adoption

Flood risk and damage are expected to increase in the Pacific Northwest due to climate change. Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) is a remote sensing technology that provides high-resolution topographic data and can therefore produce higher accuracy floodplain maps, an important tool that communities use to assess their flood risk spatially. While availability of lidar data varies across the U.S., uptake also varies even when lidar is available. Our research asked what factors influence variable lidar adoption and how can we use those factors to increase uptake. Previous research investigated important factors in the role of technology adoption in reducing long-term environmental risk; however, the current literature infrequently examined the social processes that impact an individual’s choices about how to manage risk. We used a mixed-methods approach to examine the adoption of lidar by flood managers for risk mitigation, as a function of individual (e.g., risk perception, direct experience) and collective predictors (e.g., peer influence, peer expertise). We conducted eight interviews with flood risk managers in Idaho and gathered 232 survey responses from flood risk managers in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.

We envision our semi-structured interview instrument and survey instrument to be useful for social scientists interested in researching stakeholder decision-making processes. Additionally, the survey instrument is an example of how to employ an ego network analysis, a technique that is useful for identifying the role of social processes in a complex system. Finally, we envision our dataset to be useful for future research regarding flood risk management (e.g., discrepancy of risk perception and physical flood risk) due to the breadth of empirical data regarding flood risk manager experiences in the Pacific Northwest.