ForestTECH News provides the latest updates on breaking news, research results, reports and links relevant to forest resource management and planning in Australasia.
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ForestTECH Events has, since 2007, been Australasia’s leading technology event for forest resource managers, remote sensing, GIS, mapping and inventory foresters.
ForestTECH 2018 Details
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ForestTECH News Issue 20 Summary
Welcome to this month’s issue of foresttech.news The ForestTECH 2018 event has just been completed. Many of you were involved as delegates. Feedback from this year’s series has again been excellent. Thanks. If you were the...
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ForestTECH 2018 – Event Summary
Well over 250 resource managers, remote sensing specialists and inventory foresters from throughout Australasia, SE Asia and South America have participated in the annual ForestTECH 2018 series. “What’s really gratifying is...
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Drone delivery takes off in Australia
At Amsterdam Drone Week, James Burgess of Google X spinoff Wing showed a system of drone delivery that’s made over 2500 customer flights in a test outside of Canberra, Australia. In the last nine months, Wing – graduated fr...
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Family business at the forefront of processing photogrammetry
SimActive is a leading developer of photogrammetry software. The Canadian company, which was founded by two brothers – Louis and Philippe Simard – in 2003, celebrates its 15th anniversary this year. GIM International recent...
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DroneSeed automating tree planting
Wildfires are consuming North American forests and grasslands faster than we can replace them. It’s a vicious cycle of destruction and inadequate restoration rooted, so to speak, in decades of neglect of the institutions and ...
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Future search and rescue autonomous drones
Many of us will have watched TV or movie dramas where a bunch of luckless travellers get totally lost in a dense forest. They hear the unmistakable sound of a helicopter nearby and start waving frantically. Most often, the resc...
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New technology to remotely assess individual trees
While foresters don’t necessarily have to abandon their diameter tapes and vertex hypsometers, there is no denying that rapidly-evolving remote sensing technologies are revolutionising forest management practices. Field-based...
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AU start-up hitches a ride with Rocket Lab
Forget the across-the-ditch rivalry: New Zealanders, Australians and Americans are working together to launch a fleet of satellites to power the world’s global IoT communications from space. Rocket Lab and Australian IoT star...
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Tips for UAV takeoffs and landings
What’s the single most important factor to help facilitate a successful fixed-wing UAV flight? It’s a question we get a lot from UAV (drone) operators across the world. And while it would be great to point to just one thing...
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GEDI to yield 3D forest carbon map
A new NASA laser instrument set to launch to the International Space Station in December will help scientists create the first three-dimensional map of the world’s temperate and tropical forests. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics I...
0ForestTECH News Issue 19 Summary
Welcome to this month’s issue of foresttech.news The annual ForestTECH 2018 series is now in full swing. Last week in Rotorua we had a large contingent of resource managers and inventory foresters from throughout New Zealand ...
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NZ$19M for National LiDAR initiative
Councils in New Zealand that can’t afford three-dimensional mapping of their territories stand to gain from a NZ$19 million grant from the Provincial Growth Fund. Land Information and Economic Development ministers Eugenie Sage...
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Delair announces a new drone platform
Delair has announced a new drone platform specifically optimized for the agriculture and forest industry, the Delair UX11 Ag. Built on the foundation of the successful Delair UX11 fixed-wing UAV, the new version combines the pr...
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Mapping trees with 3D mobile mapping technology
Placed first in Australia and 20th in the world in the 2016 QS University Rankings, Australian National University (ANU) is a research institution with its main campus in Canberra, the country’s capital. Research currently un...
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Airbus partners with NZ research institute
The Centre for Space Science Technology (CSST) and Airbus Defence and Space have announced a partnership agreement, which will give New Zealand businesses, industry, government and the research community access to an even wider...
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New Forest Inventory Reporting System being launched
After a successful release in Australia, Universal Forest Systems has announced that they will be launching the Forest Inventory Reporting System (FIRS) in New Zealand at the Foresttech conference in November. “FIRS is an inn...
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Unlocking the underground with airborne and legged robots
CSIRO’s Data61, the technology arm of Australia’s national science agency, is competing in the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean (or “SubT”) Challenge , which aims to explore new approaches to ra...
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Precision forestry: a revolution in the woods
This report by Harsh Choudhry and Glen O’Kelly for McKinsey & Company looks at which advanced technologies for forest management are most promising, and how forestry companies can start their digital transformation. The autho...
0ForestTECH News Issue 18 Summary
Welcome to this month’s issue of ForestTECH News. One month to go before this year’s annual ForestTECH event runs. We start in Rotorua, New Zealand on 14-15 November and then run the second leg of the tech series in Melbour...
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Forestry Applications for RIEGL’s Waveform-LIDAR technology
Based on innovative Waveform-LiDAR technology, RIEGL laser scanners and systems provide an outstanding high-density point cloud ideally suited for applications in forestry and precision agriculture. Advanced processing algorith...
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Near real time forestry monitoring innovation
We recently covered two stories on remote sensing for forestry applications. Below is information linked to a new service being supplied by a South African company, Swift Geospatial who will be presenting at the Australian leg ...
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Continuous forest monitoring using daily satellite imagery
In the recent years there has been a marked uptake of remote sensing technologies. Drones and LiDAR have acquired a high profile. These indisputably have a place provided they are cost-effective, deliver consistent results, and...
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Tree species mapping from space
Whether you’re the owner of a small private woodland or a forestry company responsible for millions of acres, Rezatec have created a free, useful guide on identifying and mapping tree species distribution. Understanding what ...
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Automatic object detection in point clouds
Classification Approaches and Method Comparison Point clouds are used as a data source for mapping tasks in various application fields. Before an object can be mapped, it needs to be detected in the point cloud, preferably by a...
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Using satellite photogrammetry for forest inventory
Forest management has undergone a transformation in recent decades. Management regimes have shifted from treatments that were applied to entire forests, to precise programmes, that can be tailored to single tree and are based o...
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Future directions for Forestry Corporation NSW MapApp
Forestry Corporation NSW (FCNSW) is exploring the possibility of commercialising its highly successful iOS-based MapApp mapping application. The MapApp: Collects, displays and shares spatial information for field-based activiti...
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Drone thermal imaging being used before harvesting
The Latrobe Valley-based Hazelwood Forestry company in Victoria, Australia is using unmanned aerial vehicles to keep an eye on the local koala population. According to the Latrobe Valley Express, the implementation of camera dr...
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Drone tree seedling deliveries a reality
While pizza deliveries seem to have caught the press and news articles eye, this innovation in the use of drones can equally show the true potential of these tools being used in the forestry sector. Traditionally planters need ...
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Monitoring forest health from afar
UAV multispectral imagery and satellite data can be used to monitor physiological stress in trees. Researchers from Crown research institute Scion treated selected Pinus radiata with herbicide to stress the trees. The colour of...
0ForestTECH News Issue 17 Summary
Welcome to this month’s issue of ForestTECH News. Registrations to our annual November tech update, ForestTECH 2018 are now flowing in and places to the workshops, already filling up. Event brochures with details on the progr...
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Mixed reality now a forestry reality
Virtual, augmented and mixed reality are no longer just for gamers and tech demos. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has called augmented and virtual reality the next major computing platform and is predicting that these technolog...
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Extreme fire risk in NZ may double
A warming New Zealand could help its plantation forests grow – but not without extreme fire risk almost doubling by the end of the century. Scion researchers have modelled what climate change will mean for the country’s pla...
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UAVs and big data are changing fibre supply
With forest company’s industry wide faced with fibre accessibility challenges, the name of the game today is supply chain optimization. A technology company based in Vancouver believes the solution is in forestry-specific dat...
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Smart digital strategies for forest management
Field Surveys are an important part of sustainable forest management. Most of the forest departments across Canada have been using traditional paper-based surveys. However, Manitoba Forestry and Peatlands Branch digitalized the...
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A new type of 3D: The Looking Glass
For the past four years, holographers, engineers, Unity developers and 3D graphic artists have been putting their minds together to create the seemingly magic Looking Glass—a holographic display that uses both lightfield and ...
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Record maiden flight of solar-powered drone
Last November as part of this region’s ForestTECH series that ran, local forest resource managers heard from Airbus Defence & Space on progress being made on a raft of projects including work on combining drone and satellite ...
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Swift Engineering UAS completes forestry mission
Swift Engineering’s Swift020 unmanned aircraft system (UAS) recently completed flights over densely forested areas in Japan. The company worked with the Ishikawa Prefecture Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry, the lo...
0ForestTECH News Issue 16 Summary
Welcome to the 16th monthly issue of ForestTECH News. We mentioned in last month’s issue that we’d been working alongside many of you to pull together this year’s annual technology event, ForestTECH 2018. This years’ se...
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13 GIS data collection apps professionals should try
You bought a GPS receiver. Or, maybe, you just want to get more out of the data from your current receiver. What’s next? Juniper Systems have compiled a list of 13 GPS and GNSS apps and solutions that will make your data coll...
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Drone missions to fight California wildfires
The California Air National Guard‘s 195th Airlift Wing recently launched a drone reconnaissance mission to aid firefighting efforts in northern California. At least six people have been killed by the raging wildfires with mor...
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Precursors to drones – way back in 1907
In 1907, just a few years after the Wright brothers lifted off in Kitty Hawk, and while human flight was still being measured in metres and minutes, Dr. Julius Neubronner, a German apothecary, submitted a patent application for...
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THOR hovers like a helicopter but can fly long-distance
A team of researchers from Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) is creating a Transformable Hovering Rotorcraft (THOR) and hopes their design can address the fact that multicopter drones cannot cover long distan...
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ForestTECH 2018 workshops likely to sell out fast
Feedback on the programmes announced last week has already been extremely positive. This year a raft of new disruptive technologies already been trialled in the forestry industry – and allied industries – are going to be sh...
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