Find every USGS 3DEP tile that covers your project. In one query.

The problem

“Which tiles do I actually need?”

Elevation work almost always starts with that question, and The National Map is a slow way to answer it. The download-cart workflow tells you what is somewhere near your area, not what genuinely intersects it, so you pan, guess, and over-collect. On a corridor, a watershed, or anything that crosses a quad boundary, that is an afternoon — and it is easy to come away with a folder that is quietly missing a tile at one end.

Learn the technology

LiDAR, explained

How a laser pulse becomes a point cloud and a bare-earth elevation model, how good the national data is, and where to get it. The walkthrough below shows the app step by step.

Watch it work

The four-minute walkthrough

The 2026 walkthrough: the seven datasets, a rectangle search over Boulder with per-dataset counts and Copy all URLs, the lidar point-cloud tiles, polygon select against the footprint grid, and Point Identify.

What it does

Tile discovery, per-dataset counts, and a URL list you can hand to a script

• Draw a rectangle (or paste a bounding box) and get the intersecting 3DEP tiles from the USGS National Map — a real spatial query, not a proximity guess. Or switch on the footprint grid and select tiles with a polygon.
• Seven datasets: the 1-meter DEM, 1/3 arc-second (~10 m) and 1 arc-second (~30 m) DEMs, the Alaska 2 arc-second and IFSAR 5 m DEMs, project-native OPR DEMs, and the lidar point cloud (LPC) — the classified LAZ tiles the 1-meter DEM is built from. 1-meter and 1/3 arc-second are on by default; LPC is off by default because each tile is 100–300 MB, and it is searched by rectangle only.
• Per-dataset counts on every search: one chip for each dataset you asked for, including a zero, so a dataset that returned nothing is visible instead of silently missing.
• Paged results: the app keeps requesting pages from the USGS API, 250 at a time and up to 500 per dataset, instead of stopping at the first response.
• Inspect any tile before you commit — extent, product, resolution, and the collection it came from.
• See the total download size first, then download a tile from its row or use Copy all URLs and paste the list into curl, aws s3 cp or GDAL. DEMs download from the USGS bucket on AWS Open Data; point clouds from USGS rockyweb.
• Runs entirely in the browser. Nothing to install, no credits.

What it does not do

It does not host or mirror the data, and it does not process it. There is no reprojection, no mosaicking, no hillshade, no contour generation and no point-cloud classification — the app finds the tiles and hands you the authoritative URLs, and everything downstream is yours to run.

It also does not cover the world. 3DEP is a United States program, so anywhere outside the US and its territories simply returns nothing. Vertical datum, collection date and quality level vary from tile to tile; the app reports what the source reports and does not reconcile them for you. If two adjacent tiles come from different collections, that seam is real, and it is still your problem to solve.

Where the data comes from

USGS 3D Elevation Program, cited and linked

Every tile the app returns is USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) data, published by the U.S. Geological Survey as public domain open data. Download links point at the official USGS public buckets on AWS — cataloged in the Registry of Open Data on AWS — not at a copy held by All Things Spatial. Nothing is re-hosted, and nothing about your query is stored.

All Things Spatial is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Geological Survey. Confirm currency, accuracy and fitness for purpose with the USGS before relying on any tile for engineering, regulatory or financial decisions.