This project will evaluate and standardize forest vegetation canopy metrics derived from lidar data. Lidar data have proven to be extremely useful for a number of science application areas, and the USGS, through the 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) is managing the acquisition of lidar data for the Nation. This project seeks to better utilize these data, and to formalize procedures for automated generation of vegetation attributes from lidar data from pre-processing of 3DEP lidar point clouds into a standardized set of vegetation products, ideally utilizing real-time, on-the-fly processing of data stored in the cloud for individualized product delivery. We are evaluating several scripting languages for generating lidar vegetation canopy metrics including Python, Python wrappers to existing toolkits (LASTools, http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/), R, and PDAL (https://www.pdal.io/).