This is a digital terrain model generated at a 3.125 ft resolution for the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on the coast of North Carolina , USA, based on the LiDAR ground points of the USGS Hurricane Forence collection and the 2019 NOAA Topobathy collection. A mean ground raster layer was generated at a half meter resolution and was used with a layer of manually generated 2D break lines to create a half meter digital terrain model using GRASS GIS r.hydro.flatten. This half meter layer was then resampled to 3.125 ft to match the resolution and cell alignment of the county-level DEM releases by the State of North Carolina at https://sdd.nc.gov/DEM03 . For direct comparison, download the county DEM layers for Dare county and Hyde county. This dataset was created as a test data set prior to processing LiDAR data for the entire North Carolina coast and as additional information for staff at the USFWS Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, https://www.fws.gov/refuge/alligator-river , https://www.google.com/maps/place/Alligator+River+National+Wildlife+Refuge/@35.7913161,-75.9331426,11.17z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x89a50771600bc55d:0xd1fc10152df77992!8m2!3d35.7927605!4d-75.876626!16zL20vMGI5dzVu?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDIyMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D . This is a research work and should not be relied upon for navigation or structural engineering. Hire a licensed surveyor for those purposes. The mean ground raster layer at a half meter resolution is also included , along with the 2D break line layer for any researchers who wish to replicate or improve the model. This data was processues using the following software: pdal 2.6.2 gdal 3.11.4 GRASS 8.4.1 QGIS 3.40.X Operating system: Linux Mint 22.2 with ubuntugis unstable PPA https://launchpad.net/~ubuntugis/+archive/ubuntu/ubuntugis-unstable LiDAR data sources: USGS Lidar Point Cloud NC_HurricaneFlorence_2020_D20 https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/61fb7856d34e622189c86ba2 2019-2020 NOAA NGS Topobathy Lidar: Coastal VA, NC, SC https://noaa-nos-coastal-lidar-pds.s3.amazonaws.com/laz/geoid18/9467/index.html