In 2017, FWPA-supported research led to the development of the ProFert for Pine tool, which was designed to improve the capacity of softwood growers to effectively predict the success of…

Germany-based wildfire solution company OroraTech has announced its new on-orbit fire processing technology that can detect and send fire notification alarms to customers via the multi-satellite link within three minutes…

The Dutch startup Aerial Precision recently demonstrated its first two sensors with integrated artificial intelligence software. Over the past few years, the company’s innovation efforts have resulted in products that…

Artificial intelligence technology is being used to help understand the damage caused by slash in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle – and help the forestry sector battle climate change. It’s…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Can you believe we are already in the second quarter of 2023? Last month we posted an early expression of interest in being part…

Sir Peter Gluckman says people are being “pulled apart by misinformation, disinformation, social media and ‘targeting’”. The world is at “a tipping point” beyond which technology may be beyond our…

A state-of-the-art satellite positioning service in Southland, in the lower South Island, New Zealand, will bring GPS accuracy to about 10cm, refining data for aviation, search and rescue, and many…

Plantation managers may soon be able to walk through large sections of forests, zero in on defects, check wood quality, and get a quicker overview on progress, all without leaving…

Finnish green tech company CollectiveCrunch has secured €1.4 million in an investment round led by existing investor Nidoco AB to fund future growth, particularly in the forest carbon market. CollectiveCrunch’s…

New Zealand’s first solar-powered stratospheric aircraft has been built and flight testing has commenced. This aircraft will be a game-changer for collecting high-resolution aerial data for applications such as extreme…

New high-resolution, satellite imagery providing a birds-eye view of Cyclone Gabrielle’s impact on the North Island’s east coast is now available online as part of New Zealand’s emergency response. Photo:…

Cyclone Gabrielle left a trail of destruction in its wake as it swept through the Hawkes Bay area, and now with the power and accessibility of satellite imagery we have…

A student-built satellite from the University of Alberta that will capture images of active wildfires has made it into orbit after a successful launch recently. The satellite Ex-Alta 2, a…

Climate tech company Mast, the newly-formed parent company of DroneSeed, has announced its acquisition of California-based Cal Forest Nurseries, which supplies the majority of seedlings used for reforestation in California.…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. In New Zealand, the news over the last month has been dominated by Cyclone Gabrielle and its aftermath. The cyclone cut off communities and…

Artificial intelligence is here, and it’s coming for your job. So promising are the tool’s capabilities, Microsoft — amid laying off 10,000 people — has announced a “multiyear, multi-billion dollar…

In 2021 and 2022, the ForestTECH series, like many other meetings and events, was disrupted by Covid. In saying that, over 300 delegates from 15 different countries were involved with…

The results of a recently completed, FWPA-supported collaborative research project have demonstrated the potential of using dense, 3D point cloud data to link tree and plot-level measurements in native forests,…

A study led by a North Carolina State University researcher found that under more severe climate warming scenarios, the inventory of trees used for timber in the continental United States…

Treetop leaf sampling ( canopy foliar sampling) at forested NEON (The National Science Foundation’s National Ecological Observatory Network ) field sites just got a whole lot easier. We’ve added a…

Geometric design and engineering of biodegradable materials could improve versatility, efficiency of aerial seeding How seeds implant themselves in soil can seem magical. Take some varieties of Erodium, whose five-petalled…

Future-proofing New Zealand’s radiata pine plantations against climate challenges and a rapidly changing economic environment has become a whole lot easier with a world-leading application of Genomic Selection (GS), a…

Rotorua and Whakarewarewa Forest will be the backdrop to a global forestry conference that is set to attract up to 500 remote sensing specialists to the city in just over…

After a long time of preparation and transportation, a PlantMax X2 Planting unit is operating in Brazil. In collaboration with partners at Timber in Curitiba Plantma Forestry has done a…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. As we start 2023, there’s plenty to catch up on as we look ahead to the future year. A couple of major events the…

ChatGPT is the world’s most powerful AI chatbot. It offers a human-like alternative to search engines and can do everything from compile a menu to writing a TV script to…

The autonomous planting machine project Autoplant is getting closer to reality. In September 2022 the first test of a complete machine was made in Bräcke, mid-Sweden, close to the Bracke…

Australian researchers have proposed a holistic approach to provide meaningful insights to support smart decision making for the future. Contemporary forest and wood products companies face a significant challenge around…

A New Zealand aviation technology company is developing pilotless planes to fight bushfires from the skies. Canterbury-based Skybase is converting aircraft to fly remotely in a world-leading move designed to…

Gaia AI has secured a US$3M Pre-Seed to automate the collection of forestry data, verify carbon credits, and build a data platform that empowers foresters to make the best financial…

Following an extensive domestic and international executive search, HQPlantations Board of Directors are pleased to announce the appointment of Jason Wilson as new Chief Executive Officer following previous CEO Jeremy…

Anew, high-tech aerial laser survey project has been completed in the New Zealand region of Taranaki, producing an exact 3D map of the region’s land surface. The survey, conducted by…

FSC ANZ has announced the launch of a new standard for responsible forest management in New Zealand. After a comprehensive process of rigorous consultation with industry, environment, and social stakeholders…

Two separate fires that started from lightning strikes earlier this month reinforce the need to increase the resources available for prescribed burning and plantation protection in Australia’s south-west forests. During…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Thank you to everyone who attended ForestTECH 2022 last month. The latest forest technology series, which was hosted in New Zealand, Australia and online,…

Another event record with over 300 delegates attending the end of year technology series, ForestTECH 2023 run by the Forest Industry Engineering Association (FIEA). Because of recent Covid travel and…

Scion’s leadership in forestry science, bioplastics research and biotechnology has been celebrated by Scion and its peers at the Science New Zealand Awards. Scientists from all seven Crown Research Institutes…

• Climate scientists and data engineers have developed a new digital platform billed as the first-ever global tool for accurately calculating the carbon stored in every tree on the planet.…

NASA plan to scrap device would curtail important climate and biodiversity data, researchers say. Since April 2019, a fridge-size instrument attached to the International Space Station (ISS) has tickled the…

As part of the just completed ForestTECH 2022 series, advances being made operationally in mechanised planting along with recent commercial trials from across Australasia, Europe and in South America featured…

Tasmania is set to continue to benefit from the rollout of new fire detection technology which will help reduce the spread of major bushfires, safeguarding valuable plantation assets and even…

The state body for the forest and timber industry in Queensland has welcomed a landmark study into the long-term benefits from state forests in South and Central Queensland as compared…

With promises to rejuvenate forests from the air, tree-planting start-ups are looking to supplement shovels and long days of labour with swarms of seed-bearing aerial drones. A growing target: B.C.’s…

At Intergeo, Emesent launched three new products that will help geospatial professionals save time while capturing accurate data for digital twins and BIM applications. Emesent is a pioneering company in…

Yamaha has introduced an upgraded version of its Fazer R G2 unmanned helicopter, or drone, equipping it with more thrust and greater payload capacity. This should make it more suitable…

The Forest Products Commission of Western Australia (FPC) is implementing Remsoft Operations with connected Optimization Modeling capabilities to streamline annual planning and forest estate management. By increasing planning effectiveness and transparency, the technology will free up…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. We are finally there. ForestTECH 2022, which was last held in Australia three years ago, will be returning as an in-person event this month.…

Scion scientists have been instrumental in developing and testing biodegradable nursery pots that will help nurseries and Kiwi gardeners to reduce plastic waste and its impact on the environment. The…

Tree seedlings are being grown six times faster in a vertical farm compared to traditional outdoor sowing, in the first UK trials of their kind. Growing 40-50cm tall in just…

Impressions from HxGN Live Global 2022 In which direction is the geospatial industry heading? Which core activities will companies focus on? How will the rapidly progressing technological advances shape the…

The way that we monitor the world’s forests has changed dramatically in recent years. Fifteen years ago, many countries still made maps and recorded information about their forests and land…

Remote sensing data is often applied to assist with environmental monitoring. However, the pace of development makes it challenging to decipher if the new sensor or technique can be used…

Cork-headquartered Treemetrics, a forestry management software firm, will play a key role in a new project to provide more accurate forest carbon credit estimates to the European Space Agency (ESA).…

The Single family have been farming their broadacre cropping property near Coonamble, in New South Wales, for close to 70 years and third generation farmer Ben Single says there has…

Critchlow Geospatial has announced the launch of New Zealand’s first satellite imagery marketplace. Recent advances in optics, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud computing mean that satellite imagery…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Hot off the press – the Victorian government has announced an AU$120 investment to plant 14,000 hectares of softwood plantations across Gippsland. The new…

The Victorian government is investing in a new plantation estate in Gippsland to plant millions of trees to maintain the state’s timber supply and reduce emissions. An AU$120 million investment…

The ForestTECH series has firmly established itself on the Australasian calendar. Since 2007, aside from a recent hiccup or two with Covid enforced travel and meeting restrictions, it’s been run annually for the forestry industry on both sides of the Tasman. In more recent years, it’s also truly become an international event with well over 100 delegates from 20 different countries joining in remotely to each event over the last…

Forestry and climate change challenges require a far more efficient, data-intensive approach than the current status quo. Forests are critical to fighting climate change, based in part on their ability…

This new opportunity comes with a free conference registration – up to about eight of them in fact for – for this year’s ForestTECH 2022 event running in Rotorua, New…

RNZAF Flight Advisor Service (flightadvisornz.io) is a new tool developed by Aeropath for the NZDF. The primary function of this tool is two-fold: Register and communicate low level hazards in…

New Zealand’s first voluntary carbon credit marketplace, Carbonz (pronounced carbon zee), is here to restore native biodiversity and help Aotearoa reach its carbon zero goals by selling the first carbon…

The Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) is developing a dashboard created with ArcGIS Dashboards that will generate reports about deforestation in the South American nation, which is renowned for its lush…

Plantma Forestry have developed a mechanised planting system that’s being used in Sweden and being trialled in both the US and Canada. During 2020 the machine was tested by 3…

FARO has announced the acquisition of one the world’s mobile scanning market leaders: GeoSLAM. With proprietary high-productivity simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) software to create 3D models for use in…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Interest in this year’s ForestTECH 2022 series is now starting to really ramp up. Three years of not meeting face to face in Australia…

Katam continues to provide global forestry with services for precise decision support and increased wood growth and quality. By using autonomous drones for video recordings, Katam now introduces an additional…

Forest environments are notoriously difficult for drone (unmanned aerial vehicle – UAV) operations. Aside from the trees themselves, hilly terrain, remote areas provide challenges for drone operators. Add in the…

In May 2017, New Zealand’s Timberlands Ltd Board of Directors and senior managers toured through Puruki Experimental Forest in the Central North Island with a team of Scion scientists. As…

It is the first satellite to take a technology called P-band radar into space – and it should help scientists to distinguish the wood from the trees. In a dust-free…

ForestTECH is this region’s premier forestry technology series. It’s the one forestry technology event that brings together forest resource managers, inventory foresters, remote sensing, GIS, mapping and forest inventory specialists…

The opinion is set to influence decision on whether to reauthorize the controversial herbicide in the EU. The controversial herbicide ingredient glyphosate does not cause cancer in humans, according to…

With the right equipment and a little luck, stealing a tree from a swath of land as remote and vast as the Olympic National Forest should have been easy enough.…

At the end of last year, we covered a story from Jetson (for those old enough you’ll remember well from your childhood those cartoons in the 1960’s that crossed our…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Interest in this year’s ForestTECH 2022 series being run for New Zealand and Australian resource and tree crop managers is now starting to really…

Fire seasons are now longer and the destruction more intense, as fires burn hotter and spread to more drought-stricken ground. Since the start of this year, 32,247 wildfires have burned…

Microsoft and New Zealand Crown Research Institute, Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, are teaming up to develop improved detection of land use and forest cover change in New Zealand. Microsoft says…

Tasmania to get 4D digital twin with Virtual Tas using laser scanning and image capture technology Enzen Australia and 42-24, a TasNetworks’ subsidiary business, have launched Virtual Tas, a joint…

Key points: 6.5 million trees will be planted around Tumut and Tumbarumba by the end of August Planting efforts have doubled to help the timber industry recover from the Black…

A single tree does not make a forest – just yet. Scion is developing and testing a range of precision forestry technologies with Hawke’s Bay forestry company Pan Pac Forest…

A unique heavy-lift UAV out of Edinburgh promises to obliterate the power and range of electric drones using a Rotax engine and bent-axis hydraulic motors similar to those used on…

From 50 trees to 2.8 million. That has been the trajectory for Lisa McCreery’s native tree nursery since it was set up 43 years ago by her parents outside Tammin…

The conservation and restoration of remnant native woodlands and wetlands to enhance biodiversity and ensure the sustainability of habitats is a priority for many agencies. The task, however, of monitoring…

The role of drones is growing rapidly in various industries, including inspection, surveillance and time-critical transport. Fast, long-flying and cost-effective drones can cope with challenging environments. Technological developments and active…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. In last month’s issue, we announced that the ForestTECH 2022 event had just been set up for forest resource and tree crop managers in…

Giant drones are the latest weapon in an ongoing “war” against the introduced African olive tree in southern Sydney. The drones are planting out a steep ridge line in the…

Newly published research by Te Uru Rākau – New Zealand Forest Service into tree planting will provide some welcome solutions to problems foresters and planters are all too familiar with.…

Komatsu Forest AB, a wholly owned subsidiary of Komatsu is going to acquire Bracke Forest AB headquartered in Bräcke, Sweden, a company that develops, manufactures and sells application-specific attachments for…

In 2021, mobile terrestrial LiDAR data and ground-based measurements were collected across 15 native forest plots in coastal NSW as part of a small pilot program. This remotely sensed LiDAR…

A weedkiller to target wilding conifers has been approved for use in New Zealand, with controls, the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) says. Method 240 SL is a herbicide used to…

Desperate efforts to regenerate Victoria’s towering ash forests, which are being regularly decimated by bushfires, involves a dedicated group searching high and low to bank enough seeds for their survival.…

The Forestry Research Institute of Sweden, “Skogforsk”, has received funding to develop a remote-controlled scarifier. The goal is to bring the technology of remote-controlled forest machines closer to reality. The…

New Zealand has committed to a net-zero emissions target by 2050. Carbon uptake by rapid planting of new forests is the only way New Zealand has to remove CO2 from…

In February last year, Forestry.com wrote about the AutoPlant project, an autonomous planting machine. We also covered it in a February 2021 issue of Friday Offcuts. Now, over a year…

Starting in 2007, every year, over 300 forest resource managers, remote sensing, GIS and mapping specialists, inventory foresters and technology providers to this part of the industry from throughout Australasia…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. First off.  For our loyal ForestTECH community, the good news is that the live – face to face – gathering that has been put…

With anticipated future innovations, this type of technology could be used to support bushfire risk management, improve the economic value of the nation’s timber resource, and overcome occupational health and…

Airforestry has been in stealth mode since the start of 2020. But now they finally reveal their pioneering technology for forest management. “We have been working in secret for almost…

In New Zealand, a Central Otago scientific research station with a globally revered reputation is marking its 60th anniversary. NIWA’s Lauder Atmospheric Research Station is almost exactly halfway between the…

New Forests, a global investment manager of nature-based real assets and natural capital strategies, last Friday announced Mitsui & Co., Ltd (Mitsui) and Nomura Holdings, Inc (Nomura), have entered into…

Using an artificial neural network, researchers at ETH Zurich have created the first high-resolution global vegetation height map for 2020 from satellite images. This map could provide key information for…

At their recent AGM the New Zealand Forest Nursery Growers Assn elected Peter Harington as the incoming president. Peter manages Rotorua Forest Nursery. The NZFNGA look after the interests of…

An algorithm guides the drones to avoid collision, fly efficiently and as a team. This is part of an experiment led by scientists from Zhejiang University in China. The drone…

An exciting new forestry project has been launched to support the integration of more trees on farms in Victoria – helping the state achieve its net zero carbon goals by…

Reforestation company DroneSeed has announced its largest sale of offsets to date to Shopify, a leading provider of essential internet infrastructure for commerce, which is on a mission to reverse…

Following the main winter planting season, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) undertakes an annual survey of tree stocks sold by commercial forestry nurseries in New Zealand. The results are…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. We are major proponents of digital technologies and the opportunities that they enable. FWPA’s new project is one such project where a centralised database…

Forest & Wood Products Australia (FWPA) is developing a single, centralised database for private forestry information through a national project to collect and collate information about commercial farm plantations, private…

NASA’s GEDI mission has reached a major milestone with the release of its newest data product, which provides the first near-global estimate of aboveground forest biomass and the carbon it…

Whether it’s wildfires that sweep across the West Coast, storms rolling in from the Pacific Ocean or dense fog that blankets the Pacific Northwest, a new weather satellite will be…

Rocket Lab successfully catch falling rocket booster with a helicopter. Rocket Lab has successfully caught one of its Electron rocket boosters, using a helicopter, as it parachuted back towards the…

A controversy is brewing between remote sensing scientists and administrators from NASA and the agency’s international partners. The debate centers around how long the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) lidar…

Drones have become an essential tool for forestry companies over the last decade. Technology continues to evolve and many consumer drones are now incorporating some of the advanced imaging, video…

Thanks to sensor miniaturization, laser technology is available for surveying and mapping professionals in many different guises nowadays. This selection of articles highlights the diversity of Lidar as a flexible…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. We have a tonne of interesting videos this month. We have several from the recent ForestTECH event which highlighted mechanised planting developments, technologies and…

The second day of the just-completed ForestTECH 2021/22 event focussed on advancements in automated silviculture with a particular focus on mechanised planting operations – new technology, developing technologies and an…

Despite continued Covid related disruptions to the running of the annual ForestTECH event, ForestTECH 2021-22 ran, albeit virtually as an on-line event on 23-24 February this year. Over 300 delegates…

Telecommunications giant Telstra is starting its own carbon farm, growing trees to reduce its emissions. Big polluters that want to move towards net zero emissions need to buy carbon credits…

Expert human drone pilots have proven incredibly adept at piloting UAV through complex courses at high speeds which are still unmatched by autonomous systems. But researchers at the University of…

From a forest biosecurity perspective, there is growing interest in forest surveillance processes capable of providing information on foliar disease present within the planted estate. Monitoring strategies often rely on…

“Tree planting transforms us. These are our stories.” On 19 March The 2022 virtual Tree Planting Film Festival entitled We Are the Landscape, provided an inside look into what it…

Reforestation company DroneSeed has announced its largest sale of offsets to date to Shopify, a leading provider of essential internet infrastructure for commerce, which is on a mission to reverse…

Adam Dick is a Science Advisor at the Canadian Wood Fibre Centre, Canadian Forest Service and joins us from Fredericton. Adam was one of the champions that brought lidar enhanced…

Over the past decade, drones have become an increasingly important tool for forest monitoring. They’re a fast and effective way to collect a lot of data in one go, without…

Critical labour shortages are the catalyst for companies to finally automate and boost our decades-long productivity stagnation On December 19, 2013 a 20-year-old Levin man, Lincoln Kidd, was crushed to…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Firstly, thanks for your support and buy-in to the reformatted ForestTECH 2021-22 a week or so ago. Initially scheduled for November 2021, the outbreaks…

Victoria’s forestry industries are set to benefit from five new research projects funded by the National Institute for Forest Products Innovation (NIFPI) centre in Gippsland. Federal Assistant Minister for Forestry…

• More than 24 million hectares (59 million acres) burned during Australia’s devastating “Black Summer” bushfire season of 2019-2020, which formed part of a confirmed climate change-driven trend of worsening…

The Biomass Carbon Monitor provides global maps of annual change in carbon stocks held in forest biomass Forests and vegetation play a major role in removing CO2 from the atmosphere.…

How is the geospatial industry evolving in today’s turbulent times? What are the trends and developments in the sector, and where is the business heading? Read the findings from GIM…

Scion data scientists working with remote sensing experts Indufor have developed a new commercial service to monitor forest establishment and indigenous forest fragments. New Zealand will need to plant forests…

The latest episode of FWPA’s WoodChat series of podcasts takes a deep dive into some exciting Australian projects focused on the fusion of forestry and technology to help shape and…

It was quite a fitting week with the Australasian forestry industry celebrating 15 years of ForestTECH, Australasia’s premier annual forest technology conference running on 23-24 February – an event that…

This ABARES Position Paper identifies drivers for change in the mechanism of forest reporting through Australia’s State of the Forests Report (SOFR), including increasing user expectations for access to current…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. This is the first issue of 2022 and how things have changed since we last corresponded. Omicron has been an unwelcome game-changer in Australia.…

The growing outbreak of omicron in New Zealand has resulted in the upcoming ForestTECH 2021/22 moving to a completely virtual online event. It will still be run on 22-23 February…

When I registered the company name Australian UAV in early 2103 the landscape for drone technology was very different to that that we work in today. There were 35 ReOC…

Otago forestry workers are using new radio technology to manage 23,730 hectares of forest more safely, even enabling them to perform under Covid-19 restrictions. Initially deployed to replace an outdated…

This video is part of the paper, “Design and Testing of a Novel Unoccupied Aircraft System for the Collection of Forest Canopy Samples,” by researchers from the University of Tasmania…

Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is increasingly being fused with air/spaceborne Lidar to characterise vegetation structure across a range of forest ecosystems. This article explores the potential of this approach to…

Mapping the world’s carbon stores is essential for taking stock of the climate crisis. It informs our climate solutions, the emissions targets’ that countries set and so – it goes…

Media Release [21 Dec 2021]: Kea Aerospace Achieves Longest Endurance UAV Flight In New Zealand On Sunday 19th December Kea Aerospace has recorded the longest known flight for an unmanned…

Tuesday marked the official launch of a new, innovative farm forestry program, Decision Tree, in Bunbury, Western Australia. Decision Tree has been designed to rapidly assess the suitability of farms…

Last year we detailed a forest canopy sampling tool that was developed by a Canadian company, DeLeaves and is being used operationally, principally in North America and Europe. Suspended under…

Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and the NSW Rural Fire Service have released Australia’s most advanced model for predicting the speed and behaviour of eucalypt forest fires, helping to save…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. As 2021 comes to a close, it’s been a year where Covid-19 has once again dominated the headlines, disrupted supply chains and threatened business…

Food and pasture growers as well as the forestry industry rely on glyphosate to prevent deep-rooted weeds from taking over their crops and decimating productivity, according to a report by…

Private Forests Tasmania and the Forest Practices Authority have developed Treemapper, a farm and forestry property planning app. The ‘Property Planning Mapper’ mobile application will deliver a handful of mapping…

This ABARES Position Paper identifies drivers for change in the mechanism of forest reporting through Australia’s State of the Forests Report (SOFR), including increasing user expectations for access to current…

Safeguarding New Zealand’s waterways is the key driver behind a seven-year study into the performance of control practices for reducing erosion and sediment delivered to rivers from forest harvesting. The…

Ernslaw One and its advisor Cranleigh Partners have announced that Ernslaw has completed an agreement to sell the Whangapoua and Ruatoria forests with a combined area of 15,100 productive hectares…

Tree seedling company ArborGen has agreed to sell its New Zealand and Australian assets to a consortium led by Hugh Fletcher for $22.25 million. ArborGen is one of the last…

Revolutionary Bushfire Management platform leverages multiple data sources and climate change-adjusted fire weather projections to predict rate of bushfire spread and intensity, fuel loads and preparedness levels. The platform has…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. A lot can happen in just a month. As you many of you will have heard, due to New Zealand’s current covid-19 outbreak and…

In the lead up to ForestTECH 2021/22, we will be adding new videos to our ForestTECH News Video Showcase page. This page already has over 50 forest technology videos and…

Civil governments around the world are making sustainable strides in local environmental management; and by using satellite-enabled data, they are able to analyze and support preventative management techniques to protect…

As part of the eagerly awaited annual forest technology event, two key presenters from the European forestry giant, Stora Enso Oy will be presenting as part of ForestTECH 2021/22. The…

Disease and pest free animals and crops rely on agrichemical use. Pesticides, detergents and sanitisers are a critical component of New Zealand’s NZ$48 billion agricultural sector. The recently released and…

After talking to presenters, exhibitors and delegates for this year’s eagerly awaited ForestTECH 2021 event that was planned to run on 23-24 November 2021, it has been agreed to postpone the…

Two European pension funds, APG Asset Management (APG) on behalf of its Dutch pension fund client ABP, and UK’s Pension Protection Fund (PPF), have agreed to purchase Sinotrans New Zealand…

DroneSeed has announced it has raised US$36 million in its Series A funding round. The round was led by Social Capital and Seven Seven Six, with participation from new and…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. We are now only 6 weeks before ForestTECH 2021 runs in Rotorua, New Zealand and virtually for our Australian and international delegates. As its…

SilviScan is a multifaceted technology comprised of an advanced suite of software and instruments including a cell scanner, x-ray densitometer, and x-ray diffractometer, which are used together to measure wood…

In September 2018, the federal government unveiled a plan to radically expand Australia’s timber plantations by one billion trees over a decade. Today, less than 1 per cent of that…

Dawn Aerospace has joined the New Zealand Airspace Integration Trials Programme (AITP). The news was announced yesterday by Minister of Research, Science and Innovation, Hon Megan Woods. The AITP’s mission…

In September 2020, the Norwegian Government announced a contract providing public access to high-resolution satellite imagery of tropical forests. Never has the public had open access to satellite imagery with…

Amendments to the Climate Change Response Act 2002 in June 2020 delivered a range of improvements to the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). These reforms aim to drive a substantial…

It was an interest in trees, not fires that set CFA Deputy Chief Officer Alen Slijepcevic on a path that led him around the world where he is today found…

The past 50 years have seen rapid changes across landscapes, with forests and wetlands alike converted for agricultural use or, conversely, re-afforested due to policy or economic drivers. While official…

There are many situations where data is not available in the quantity desired, but you don’t need to wait for the ideal scenario to get started with AI. You can…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. We hit a major ForestTECH News milestone this month, with September 2021 being our 50th issue. After more than a decade of running the…

Southern California’s PteroDynamics has somehow escaped our attention thus far, but this company’s radically different take on the electric VTOL aircraft is well worth a look, and the company claims…

US-based enterprise drone data company DroneDeploy has acquired Rocos, a New Zealand-based robotics software company, in a move that will allow its customers in construction, energy and agriculture to deploy…

Driven by Increasing Demand for Reforestation in the Face of Wildfires & Climate Change, Acquisition of Silvaseed Co. Positions DroneSeed as Vertically-Integrated Leader in Reforestation DroneSeed announced that it has…

2021 continues to be a leap forward in drone-based UAV LiDAR at Interpine. To complement their two Emesent Hovermap LiDAR units they have also recently purchased the DJI Zenmuse L1…

With a total length of 2,789km, the Trans-Sumatra Toll Road Project is one of Indonesia’s National Strategic Projects and the longest toll road project in Southeast Asia. In order to…

According to the NSW Fire and Environment Summary, about a quarter of New South Wales’ best koala habitat were burned in the bushfires. Other areas of Australia are also not…

As outlined in a recent issue, this year’s ForestTECH 2021 programme being run in Rotorua, New Zealand on 23-24 November will be built around two main themes. The first is…

USC researchers will develop a citizen science app for people living in fire-prone areas to help predict the likelihood of bushfires in Australia and minimise their devastating effects. The University…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. We start this month with the sale of 24,000ha of Green Triangle forests, located on the border of Victoria and South Australia, to AXA…

As light detection and ranging (lidar) technology evolves, forest ecology and ecological restoration researchers have been using these tools in a wide range of applications. “We needed an accounting of…

For many years, Dr Christine Stone of the NSW Department of Primary Industries has been leading research projects around the use of remote platforms equipped with various types of sensors…

This will mark the first time Australia has managed its own source of Earth observation data, contributing to the growth of the nation’s space industry.  The satellite can take images…

Gresham House is pleased to announce that it will be appointed as asset manager for a 24,800-hectare Australian forestry investment, Green Triangle Forest Products (GTFP), which AXA IM Alts has…

Investment house AXA IM has taken control of 24,000 hectares of pine plantations straddling the border between Victoria and South Australia in a $775 million deal with US fund manager…

Murray Woods, Principal Consultant at Treedimensions, shares his experiences with and thoughts about airborne, terrestrial and hand-held lidar, single photon lidar, lidar enhanced forest inventories, area-based vs. individual tree-based lidar…

A recent South African study created crop type maps using Lidar, Sentinel-2 and aerial data along with several machine learning classification algorithms for differentiating four crop types in an intensively…

Editor’s Update: Since posting this story, ForestTECH 2021 has been rescheduled and is now being held on 23-24 February 2022. Last year, for the first time since the ForestTECH series…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. The big news this month for the ForestTECH community is the release of the ForestTECH 2021 programme and the opening of early registrations. As…

Every year one major forest technology series is run in this region. It’s designed by and for Australasian forestry resource managers, inventory foresters, researchers and tech developers. It’s the one…

AFRY has acquired Simosol Oy, a Finland-based company that specialises in advanced simulation and optimisation solutions for forest and agricultural assets. The acquisition is in line with AFRY’s ambition to…

WISA Woodsat wooden satellite completed a successful stratospheric flight on Saturday 12 June 2021, when a test model of the satellite was sent on a flight from Heureka Science Center…

Nelson Artificial Intelligence (NAI), a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for thorny environmental challenges, has spun off its first business after securing a NZ$1.8 million investment in technology that…

ForestTECH is this region’s most popular annual independent forestry technology series. This year, in addition to advances being made in remote sensing and forest inventory, like ForestTECH 2020, one of…

The DeLeaves canopy sampling tool was designed and developed in a research laboratory specializing in aerial robotics at the University of Sherbrooke, back in 2017. Suspended under an unmanned aerial…

In a recent launch, Outsight said that they are bringing the power of real-time LiDAR technology to the forestry industry. In an associated media release, they were offering; An automated…

Researchers from the Department of Geographical and Historical Studies at the University of Eastern Finland, and from the Finnish Environment Institute, are collaborating in the IBC-Carbon project to develop novel…

Tree-tracking technology is drawing investor attention as the boom in planting pledges to combat climate change highlights a basic problem: how to identify new growth and how healthy it remains.…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. It seems Covid-19 is not done with Australia yet, with a significant outbreak sending Victoria into a hard 7-day lockdown and border restrictions with…

New, accurate lower limits for measuring tree height have been established using unmanned aerial vehicles. Height is a good indication of how productive (and healthy) a tree is. Height can…

When we think of old tech in space, we think of the retrofuturism of old sci-fi movies like Star Wars and Alien — their huge 8-bit computers and monochrome screens…

New Zealand’s aerospace industry is getting a boost through the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), to grow the capability of the sector and potentially lead to joint space missions, Research, Science…

New Australian space startup Quasar Satellite Technologies is set to revolutionise space communication, allowing ground stations to talk to hundreds of satellites at once using technology developed by CSIRO, Australia’s…

The Australian Association for Unmanned Systems hosted the RPAS in Australian Skies 2021 conference in March 2021. This was an important event for the industry and continued the discussion on…

The Australian Government is laying the foundations for new jobs in the new frontier of aviation services with the release of the National Emerging Aviation Technologies (NEAT) Policy Statement. As…

New Zealand’s aerospace industry is getting a boost through the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), to grow the capability of the sector and potentially lead to joint space missions, Research, Science…

Airbus is introducing autonomous features to its helicopter Flightlab through a project code-named Vertex. These technologies aim to simplify mission preparation and management, reduce helicopter pilot workload, and further increase…

With the introduction of environmental policies comes an increasing need to monitor changes across landscapes. While high revisit satellite data is touted as providing such a solution; it is often…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Planning for ForestTECH 2021 is now well and truly underway. We’re now seeking early expressions of interest to present at this year’s event, which…

A new camera-based fire detection system has been trialed in Tasmania for the first time by forest management company SFM. The Firehawk system provides real time fire detection allowing for…

ForestTECH – What is it? ForestTECH is Australasia’s premier annual forest technology event. It’s being run now for 14 years, principally in New Zealand and Australia. It’s aimed at resource…

Business leaders faced a topsy-turvy world even before COVID-19 hit. Technological change was bewilderingly rapid, customer attitudes and behaviours were shifting dramatically, political uncertainty was growing and global competition was…

Rocos recently hosted a ‘Rise of the Service Robots’ webinar, in partnership with Avanade. Alongside our CEO David Inggs, the panel featured expert speakers from Avanade, Orlando Health and Hello…

Treemetrics, the Cork-based forestry data company, has launched a new remote valuation tool for private forest owners in partnership with Arboreal, an iPhone app developer in Sweden. Enda Keane, Treemetrics’…

What if technologies could be installed permanently within forest environments? And what if this enabled our forests to function like ‘smart cities’, where equipment is continuously used to support optimal…

Imagine a system that could detect any bushfire in Australia within minutes of ignition so firefighters could tackle the blaze before it spreads. Recently, an important development on the road…

All mainstream network operators in New Zealand are steadily deploying 5G across the country. While we explore the scale of innovation and growth that 5G offers in almost all sectors…

In this article, we introduce a deep learning pipeline that extracts information from high-resolution aerial data. The solution extends our current machine learning processes that use an object-based approach for…

A National Elevation Programme currently being carried out by Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) in partnership with Regional Councils aims to make available a consistent, high quality…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Two major forestry events, HarvestTECH 2021 and Forest Safety & Technology 2021, officially launch in Rotorua, New Zealand in just under a week. Over 350 harvesting…

DroneSeed, the innovative drone planting company that has presented at the last two ForestTECH events and has undertaken operational trials in forests a number of local locations, has been recognised…

Fortunately, a full series of technology events and shows are being planned in Australasia by the Forest Industry Engineering Association (FIEA). A full list of events can be found on…

Margules Groome, on behalf of the New Zealand Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI), are currently undertaking the 2020 update to the New Zealand wood availability forecasts (WAF). These forecasts build…

Through a combination of predictive algorithms, prescriptive optimization-based modelling, and a live operational planning system, artificial intelligence (AI) can enable continuous improvement throughout the forestry supply chain and provide real…

UNSW Canberra Space’s M2 CubeSat satellites successfully launched with Rocket Lab’s ‘They Go Up So Fast’ mission from New Zealand earlier today, representing a significant step forward in Australia’s sovereign…

Humans and computers generated more than 64 zettabytes of data in 2020 – that’s the equivalent of 6.4 trillion gigabytes or simply put, more images or videos than the average…

Lidar technology is synonymous with 3D point clouds. What are the latest trends for the four most popular Lidar platforms, and how are the developments benefiting end users of the…

Skydio, the leading U.S. drone manufacturer and world leader in autonomous flight, today announced that Skydio X2 has received the CES® 2021 Best of Innovation Award for Drones and Unmanned Systems. The announcement was…

An Australian mining group has advanced the future of mobility (in mining at least) with the deployment of a fleet of fully-autonomous Ford Rangers at one of its mines. Fortescue…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. We have a bunch of new stories this month. The first story can be seen as both a positive and a negative. NZTech has…

Starlink is a much-anticipated satellite internet service scheduled to launch for New Zealand and Australian customers later this year. Its aim is to bring affordable, broadband-equivalent data speeds to anyone,…

Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency, together with the forest industry and researchers, invests 20 million SEK (approx. 2 million EURO) on development of an autonomous planting system, the Autoplant. The project…

Invitation for a short survey for academic research surrounding forest inventory metrics and capture. RMIT University, located in Melbourne Australia, is currently conducting a short, anonymous survey surrounding the current…

Robots help us in many ways – from assembly lines to looking after the elderly. Now they’re turning their attention to combating climate change by helping to plant trees. Milrem…

Forests are crucial for global efforts to prevent dangerous climate change. As the global community works out what to prioritize in this quest against catastrophe, figuring out which forests are…

Australia will develop a nationally consistent bushfire modelling and prediction capability under an agreement announced between CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, and AFAC, the National Council for Fire and Emergency…

Germany’s UP42 has announced that data from the planned Australian LatConnect 60 satellite constellation will be available on its geospatial marketplace platform. Perth-based LatConnect 60 intends to launch a constellation…

New Zealand’s tech sector is struggling to get enough skilled staff despite strong job growth and thousands of new tech jobs being created every year, a new survey says. The…

Trimble Forestry announced recently that its widely used Log Information Management System (LIMS) now integrates seamlessly with the Connected Forest™ Xchange (CFX). The integration allows load ticket information from LIMS…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. As the first issue of the year goes out, we’re reminded that COVID-19 still has a big part to play in 2021. At the…

NOAA has awarded Black Swift Technologies (BST) a contract to develop GPS-denied navigation, enabling Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations for drones in GNSS-denied environments. With nearly 95,000 miles…

A hidden gem within the ForestTECH website is our Video Showcase section. This section highlights new technologies and innovations related to forest managememnt. We are always on the lookout for…

American Robotics, a leading developer of fully-automated commercial drone systems, today became the first company approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate automated drones without human operators on-site.…

The space age was built on clever materials. The business ends of rocket engines are composed of Inconel, a family of heat-and-corrosion-resistant nickel-chromium alloys developed in the 1940s. The “gold…

The U.S. Department of Commerce has blacklisted DJI. The world’s largest drone manufacturer has been added to the agency’s “Entity” list along with 76 other companies, including other Chinese technology…

Remsoft, a forestry planning and optimization software leader, is partnering with Safe Software FME Certified data integration specialists Locus and Consortech to automate data integration in the Remsoft Operations Cloud.…

At the end of last year, well over 300 tree crop managers, establishment foresters and remote sensing specialists attended or came in remotely for the ForestTECH 2020 event that was…

In a world-first, the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has granted Dawn Aerospace an Unmanned Aircraft Operator Certificate to fly a suborbital spaceplane from a conventional airport. Authorised under…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Thank you to everyone involved in last month’s ForestTECH 2020 that ran a couple of weeks ago. In a first for ForestTECH, a new…

A Record Global Turnout In the lead up to ForestTECH 2020, most within the industry would have thought that it would have been a very hard (in fact, nigh near…

With the introduction of environmental policies comes an increasing need to monitor changes across landscapes. While high revisit satellite data is touted as providing such a solution; it is often…

A solar-powered, unmanned aircraft is being developed in Christchurch, New Zealand in the hope it will be a game changer for the aerial imaging industry. Kea Aerospace is developing the…

Dryad Networks is prepping an IoT network of sensors connected via a solar-powered wireless mesh for deployment in forests as an early warning system to detect fires. A German start-up…

CASA’s drone registration site is now open and if you operate drones for any purpose other than just for fun, you must register them by 28 January 2021. This applies…

Drones becoming a useful tool in wildfire meteorology, the effort to understand weather that leads to fire risk. As wildfires continue to rage across vast swaths of the western United…

Much has been reported on the development and advancements of local research efforts into robotics and automated data capture for forest operations. Elsewhere, USA-based company Treeswift provides an example of…

One benefit of high-revisit satellites is their ability to re-image the same location daily or weekly. In this example, we use temporal satellite observations (2016 to 2020) to track drought…

As wildfires continue to ravage vast swaths of land across the western United States unmanned aerial vehicle operators are stepping up to provide critical services, acting as eyes in the…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. In just two weeks we will be running this year’s ForestTECH 2020! This is shaping up to be one of the largest ever ForestTECH events with…

Editors Note: Aerometrex is also a sponsor of ForestTECH 2020 and will present this exciting new innovation in detail at the conference. Aerometrex has just announced that it’s developed a…

Emesent is an innovative Australian data analytics and drone autonomy start-up. The company presented at last year’s ForestTECH 2019 event and will again be presenting at this years ForestTECH 2020…

Lim Geomatics has been included among the winners of the 32nd annual Growth List. The definitive ranking of Canada’s fastest-growing companies was announced on 15 October and is compiled by…

An analysis of satellite images has pinpointed individual tree canopies over a large area of West Africa. The data suggest that it will soon be possible, with certain limitations, to…

Planet has released a two-part how-to webinar series to demonstrate two key use cases that Planet data is used for in forest management. The first part covers how to efficiently…

A Kickstarter campaign to empower everyday people to become a part of the global effort against climate change was launched in New Zealand this week. TreeTime, a new tree planting…

Brazil is a nation of superlatives. It is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, and home to the largest rainforest, the largest freshwater preserve, and a quarter…

Editors Update: Rocket Lab successfully launched on 28 October 2020 (see a video of the launch below). Planet’s next scheduled launch of Flock 4e’, a total of 9 SuperDoves on…

A group of international scientists from New Zealand and Singapore is collaborating on a three-year project, funded by MBIE, to use data science and remote sensing to automatically model and…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. As detailed, plans for the ForestTECH 2020 event running in Rotorua, New Zealand on 18-19 November 2020 are well on track. As anticipated, conferences…

Twelve months ago, ultra-fast charging (UFC) pioneer, StoreDot, achieved a world first with its partner BP by successfully fully-charging a two-wheeled electric vehicle in just 5 minutes. Today, the company…

Drones have become a valuable asset for the Gisborne District Council. with three machines proving their worth several times over. Use of the drones has grown extensively over the three…

Update: The rockets successfully launched on Saturday 19 September 2020. South Australia’s west coast will roar with the sound of rocket launches this week, as start-up Southern Launch begins its…

In all likelihood the use of Chinese-made drones and Chinese-made drone components by federal agencies will soon be banned. An amendment, which Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican from Wisconsin added to the…

FPInnovations is moving full speed ahead with its automated-harvesting project to usher in a new era of  forestry machinery with an eye to one day operating fully autonomous machines. Much of…

ForestTECH is this region’s most popular annual independent forestry technology series. This year, in addition to advances being made in remote sensing and forest inventory, for the first time, one…

OneFortyOne is pleased to announce the appointment of Andy Giles Knopp as Chief Executive Officer, effective 21 September 2020. Prior to this announcement Andy has been a key member of…

Drone owners in Australia will soon need to register their aircrafts under laws first introduced back in 2019. With drones increasing in popularity in recent years, Australia’s aviation regulator, Civil…

Inventors of a system which can detect bushfires in minutes will share in more than AU$5 million from the Morrison Government to roll out the technology here at home and…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. A lot can change in a month. At the time of our last issue, New Zealand celebrated being 100 days COVID-19 free and, on…

The use of an unmanned aerial system (UAS) – cameras and Lidar sensors mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or ‘drone’) – to acquire geodata for mapping purposes has…

For the first time since the annual ForestTECH series started back in 2007, this year’s event will involve two separate themes over the two days. ForestTECH 2020 runs in Rotorua…

UBC Faculty of Forestry, in partnership with FPInnovations and spatial analytics platform provider LlamaZOO, has been awarded $300,000 in funding to further develop and commercialize TimberOps, an immersive visual analytics…

OneFortyOne Plantations announced this week that Linda Sewell has announced her resignation as Chief Executive Officer of the Company, effective 28 August, 2020. In a statement released from the Board…

Argentina had planned to put into orbit a satellite with new precision technology, to monitor felling of its native forests round the clock and accurately measure forest carbon stocks in…

One of the primary uses of satellite imagery for many applications is to monitor change across landscapes. Randomly scattered cloud across images is one an obvious nuisance that frustrates this…

A New Zealand-based aerospace company is on the path to revolutionising space transportation. Dawn Aerospace, headquartered in Christchurch, New Zealand, has unveiled its suborbital spaceplane, the “Mk-II Aurora”, ahead of…

As previously reported, ForestTECH 2020 is being run this year. At this stage, because of COVID-19 restrictions limiting travel, it’s being run as a physical conference along with exhibitions in…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. For the ForestTECH community, the great news is that ForestTECH 2020 is still on. Despite closed borders, social distancing requirements and uncertainties around Australian…

Every year, since 2007, forestry resource managers, remote sensing, GIS and mapping specialists, inventory foresters, researchers and key technology suppliers from across Australasia attend the forestry technology series, ForestTECH. It’s…

“A pixel is worth 1024 bits”! Captured from the right perspective, every forest manager now sees aerial images as essential in their toolkit! Converting the data bits from a drone…

Parrot has launched ANAFI USA, a new drone designed for first responders and enterprise professionals. Parrot’s next-generation drone offers 32x zoom, thermal imaging, a ruggedized airframe, and advanced data security ANAFI USA…

In an effort to jump-start a drone economy, Russia is investing millions to boost UAS infrastructure. International Aero Navigation Systems received $7.15 million from Russia’s National Technological Initiative Fund to…

A couple of weeks ago we included a story on six experimental burns of gorse scrub in the Rakaia Gorge, New Zealand carried out by Scion’s rural fire research team.…

Having introduced the use of the Planet Satellite Imagery to the forestry sector in 2017, Interpine has announced that they have extended their capability by partnering with Planet to offer…

AUAV has announced the merger with another leading Australian drone services business, Uaviation. Uaviation have been operating in Victoria since 2013 and have a strong client base that aligns well…

Interpine has recently purchased the Emesent Hovermap LiDAR simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) solution to better serve the company’s clients. “We’ve been using Hovermap technology in a series of forestry…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. A lot can change in a month. While the reopening of New Zealand and most of Australia has been successful, COVID-19 is still a…

Indufor, Scion and the School of Forestry, University of Canterbury in New Zealand are currently developing new methods to improve regional descriptions of plantations and small woodlots. These methods will…

A drone “mosaic” of harvested forestry blocks is letting Marlburians see the wood for the trees, and could cut down environmental issues. In New Zealand, Marlborough company GeoInsight Limited is…

The better question is: Are you using these technologies to give employees the careers they want? Sometimes we don’t ask the right questions. Will innovative technology catch the attention of…

Microsoft has announced plans to establish its first datacenter region in New Zealand, a major milestone toward delivering enterprise-grade cloud services in the country. The New Zealand datacenter region will…

An Australian national study is underway to identify the wood resource characteristics of private forest estates (private native forests and farm forests) and Indigenous managed forests suitable for commercial uses.…

Woolpert, Inc and iXblue Sea Operations division, part of the French based iXblue Group, have been awarded two significant airborne LiDAR mapping projects in New Zealand covering over 38,500 square…

ForestX and Collective Crunch to join forces to lead digitalisation of forestry in Sweden – CollectiveCrunch’s one-of-a-kind AI, Linda Forest, will be added to ForestX’s portfolio and the experienced digitalization…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. It’s welcome relief that both New Zealand and Australian COVID-19 lockdowns are easing and businesses, that weren’t already operating, are now opening up again. This…

TracPlus has successfully closed a significant funding round with New Zealand’s most experienced technology investment firm, Movac, investing NZ$5m. TracPlus offers real-time tracking, communication and integrated solutions for those in…

As increasing numbers of geospatial professionals realize the potential for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations in drone applications, the topic has become an important discussion point across the industry. Here, we ask Pierre-Alain Marchand, Regulatory Compliance…

In recent tech events run by the Forest Industry Engineering Association we’ve profiled world leading robotics technologies that are being developed by US-based robotics company, Boston Dynamics. Their “dog-like” Spot…

The Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, distinguished by its size and its wedge-shaped tail, is a much-loved species. Preying on reptiles, birds and mammals, across a wide range of habitats, from the…

On land north of Toronto that previously burned in a wildfire, drones are hovering over fields and firing seed pods into the ground, planting native pine and spruce trees to…

Joseph J Landsberg, Richard H Waring and Nicholas C Coops share the 2020 Marcus Wallenberg Prize for a model to predict forest growth in a changing climate. Satellite imagery offers…

A New Zealand-based drone company that established a foothold in the United States has gone into liquidation. Altus Unmanned Aerial Solutions International Ltd designed and assembled drones, combining ruggedness with…

The latest episode of FWPA’s WoodChat podcast, focuses on the development of new technology, allowing growers to easily and affordably assess wood quality across their resources. The researchers have been…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. The last couple of months has changed the face of the planet. COVID-19 has highlighted just how exposed we are to viral pandemics and…

This is the first call for expressions of interest to present at this year’s November series of ForestTECH 2020. ForestTECH – what is it? Forestry resource managers, remote sensing, GIS…

Climate change and catastrophic weather phenomena dominated much of the global headlines in 2019, with devastating reports of earthquakes, hurricanes, and other powerful forces of nature destroying homes and lives.…

The Intelligent GeoSolutions (IGS) team at the University of Maine’s Center for Research on Sustainable Forests (CRSF) has released a free interactive mapping tool, the Forest Ecosystem Status a … Trends…

Been wanting to know more about Airborne Hyperspectral Imaging? To appreciate the significance of airborne hyperspectral imaging, Analytik has created an informative video to understand what hyperspectral imaging is, and how…

NASA researchers have developed new satellite-based, weekly global maps of soil moisture and groundwater wetness conditions and one to three-month U.S. forecasts of each product. While maps of current dry/wet…

The ability to not only monitor in-field stress but also to try and predict where the stress might spread has always been a key piece of information for any forestry…

Whether you’re a seasoned UAV pilot or an aspiring operator looking to take to the skies, there is always something new to learn about piloting and operating drones. To help…

The Finnish-German startup CollectiveCrunch has received €500K funding from the European Space Agency (ESA) to further develop its one-of-a-kind AI, Linda Forest, and bring its service to new markets. ESA…

Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) has announced that drone registration and accreditation will soon become a requirement to fly a drone unless you are in a CASA-verified model airfield…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. So, what a difference a month makes. When the last monthly issue came out there were rumblings about our country’s borders potentially being closed.…

LiDAR technology is nothing new to Lim Geomatics and their leading edge teams love seeing innovation with LiDAR technology. As Apple released a new iPad Pro with a LiDAR scanner,…

2019 was a year of change and progress for the drone industry.  What comes next – more consolidation and an industry slow down, or more exciting innovation and industry expansion?…

LIDAR has gained much popularity as a means for self-driving cars to survey the space around them. At their most basic, LIDAR is a surveying method that uses lasers to…

China has recently shared the first high-resolution 3D images captured by the Gaofen-7 imaging satellite, which was launched in November. The satellite – the latest in a series of 14…

Remote sensing sensors onboard satellites have the ability to capture data showing the interaction of vegetation with sunlight during photosynthesis and this data can be manipulated for vegetation analysis to…

In the last few decades, the forestry sector has embraced a range of new precision management tools and techniques to manage forests on a new scale. Precision management is based…

One of the good things about drones is the fact that they can safely be flown in conditions that would prove hazardous for crewed aircraft. That’s where the JC260 unmanned…

Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA) congratulates mechanical engineer and University of Tasmania PhD student Sean Krisanski, who has been announced as one of the winners of the 2020 Science…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. There is no doubt, drones have come a long way over the last 5 years and this month we’ve profiled a number of new…

Wellington technology start-up Lynker Analytics has been selected by New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment (the Ministry) to lead a consortium including UAV Mapping NZ and Carbon Forest Services to…

Startups are capitalising on renewed interest in environmental solutions after Australia’s bushfires brought climate change to the front of investors’ minds.  “We’ve got a problem in front of us. If we don’t…

An army of drones could protect Australia from bushfires and help in alpine search and rescue efforts if a collaboration between the University of Canberra and technical engineering firm Tactical…

Interholco is a global provider of wood, a leading company on international markets since 1962, producing and selling logs, lumber and laminated scantlings. Interholco combines industrial processes with a dedication…

The concept of the STA logger (pronounced sta, not S.T.A) has been around for a long time, but increases in hardware and software capabilities coupled with decreases in costs soon made the…

Post-harvest forest residue surveys are crucial for assessing harvest efficiency; accounting for merchantable waste, marketable fiber for secondary use, or available bioenergy biomass; compliance of ecological objectives such as coarse…

To what extent will the smartphone become a professional mapping tool? Modern smartphones already contain many of the important functions to be used as mapping tools. However, whether they are…

Last week, NVIDIA announced the world’s smallest supercomputer, designed for artificial intelligence “at the edge.”  This technology – the continued miniaturization of incredibly powerful computing systems – could transform the…

NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation mission (GEDI) released its first publicly available data on January 21, 2020, giving researchers access to measurements of forests around the world. GEDI (pronounced like the Jedi…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. This is the first issue for 2020. Remember – this is your newsletter so please send us through any links, research findings, trial results,…

State-of-the-art geospatial data collection and modelling to assess, monitor and forecast the quality, health and value of local forestlands is the focus of a new NASA-funded project led by the…

Autonomous drone-based transportation startup Volocopter has revealed its first partner for its new VoloDrone industrial and commercial electric vertical take-off and landing craft: John Deere . The agricultural and industrial…

As you’d expect, DJI had a big presence at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). But on top of showing off the company’s hardware line-up and handheld imaging systems, the…

Editors Note: While this press release was first posted in November 2019, it is still worth highlighting the story on ForestTECH.News. Southland’s involvement in the international space sector is set…

An unmanned aerial vehicle made what is believed to be the world’s first autonomous flight under a forest canopy in Rotorua, New Zealand in late November 2019. Remote sensing scientists…

For the first time, scientists have developed a method to monitor carbon emissions from tropical forests at an unprecedented level of detail. The approach will provide the basis for developing…

• UK company Dendra plans to plant 500 billion trees by 2060 – using AI and drones.• The drones can plant 120 seedpods per minute.• The WWF estimates we’re losing…

Lim Geomatics, a software and consulting company that leverages innovative technology to create geospatial products and services in the natural resources sector, and FPInnovations, a non-profit organization that specializes in…

Another delivery drone has just buzzed into view, and this one’s a giant. Built by aerospace manufacturer Bell, the Autonomous Pod Transport 70 — or APT 70 for short —…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. This will be the final issue for 2019. This year we have produced 11 monthly issues and grew the newsletter to over 6,500 direct subscribers…

Forestry resource managers, remote sensing GIS and mapping specialists, inventory foresters and key technology suppliers from throughout Australasia were involved in ForestTECH 2019. Over 250 delegates were involved this year.…

SKYLAB in Hamburg, Germany have just presented at this year’s ForestTECH 2019 series. Two practical workshops yesterday finished the series of conferences, exhibitions and workshops that have been run for…

At the recent ForestTECH 2019 series run for New Zealand and Australian foresters, a US company, DroneSeed, outlined their work with forestry companies using swarms of drones for both planting…

CSIRO received the inaugural 2019 GEO Sustainable Development Goals Award for Innovation during GEO Week 2019 in Canberra, a global meeting of more than 1100 delegates from government, business, non-profit…

With the increased need to integrate meaningful and engaging technology and ICT capability tools in schools, teachers are increasingly required to discover and learn new ways to incorporate these tools…

The Woodlot Analysis Tool is now available on the Forest Growers Research website. The Woodlot Analysis Tool has a focus on small forest growers in New Zealand, to provide an…

The U.S. Department of Interior has announced that it would ground its fleet of DJI drones. The decision, which is the result of congressional pressure, is the latest move in…

Rapid developments in VR (Virtual Reality) technology make it timely to explore the potential of advanced 3D visualisation to support forest inventory. VR offers the potential for field staff to…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. Those receiving monthly issues of foresttech.news are principally resource managers, remote sensing, GIS and mapping specialists, inventory foresters and technology suppliers involved in the…

Scion has pioneered a new artificial intelligence (AI) based system that uses low-cost RGB imagery from UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) to identify radiata pine seedlings. The algorithm they have created…

Point clouds can be captured by an ever-increasing number of means to understand the surrounding reality and detect critical developments. Diverse applications of 3D laser scanning or ‘Lidar’, which is a…

At the recent InterDrone conference in Las Vegas, Michael Ritter of SlantRange gave a great presentation – and explained how drones may be able to completely revolutionise global agriculture. Imagine aerial data that can…

The airborne market for area-wide 3D data acquisition is experiencing a noticeable trend towards a hybrid mapping concept. In the near future, most airborne data collection will increasingly be performed…

While they’re still primarily known as a manned aircraft giant, Airbus has been taking a significant role in unmanned innovation – and now they’re ready to offer a commercial product.…

A grassroots community of mapmakers that created an interactive map viewed by over 800,000 people during the Pigeon Valley Fire earlier this year has been honoured for its vision and…

The NZ Government is establishing an Airspace Integration Trials Programme to support the safe testing and development of advanced unmanned aircraft and accelerate their integration into the aviation system, Research,…

Remote sensing is a great way to learn more about our forests and manage them accordingly. Scion is exploring new methods to capture information, such as SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar).…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News. We open this issue with a new approach to fighting forest fires. A joint Canadian initiative will see the development and launch of a…

Currently, in Canada, wildfires are managed using an approach known as ‘initial attack’, in which fires are detected early and fought quickly and aggressively with the objective of full suppression.…

This article is part of our ForestTECH 2019 featured sponsors From monitoring plant evolution through to using remote sensing to track forest health, the applications for engaging the objectivity of…

To capitalise on those travelling through to Rotorua to attend the New Zealand leg of the ForestTECH 2019 series this year, two workshops have been set up for ForestTECH 2019…

If a trillion trees are planted on all of the land on the planet that’s available for reforestation, scientists have calculated that it could capture two-thirds of the carbon that…

Putting the world’s eyes in the skies to work to improve human lives and combat climate change is now easier thanks to an overhaul of the Food and Agriculture Organization’…

The finalists in the sixth New Zealand Spatial Excellence Awards (NZSEA) were announced in early September. The 2019 Awards received 34 entries from a diverse range of organisations and individuals…

Trimble (TRMB) announced, on 4 September 2019, that it has acquired 3LOG Systems, Inc., a leading supplier of timber management software solutions. The acquisition complements Trimble’s forestry business software portfolio and further…

We have highlighted Airobotics a number of times here on ForestTECH. Airobotics is a world-leading UAV company producing autonomous drones for industry application. They made history earlier this year when…

Tokyo-headquartered Terra Drone Corporation, the world’s largest industrial drone services provider, has finalized its expansion into the Australian market after completing an equity investment in Australian firm, C4D Intel Pty…

ForestTECH 2019, this region’s annual gathering of resource managers, remote sensing, GIS and mapping specialists, inventory foresters and technology providers into this part of the forestry industry, runs again in…

Once a promising, futuristic tech at the start of the 2010s, drones are now the centre of a troubled, overcrowded sector. New commercial drone businesses flooded into the market at…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.news. We open this issue with a new report highlighting that New Zealand and Australian employees are more open to advanced workplace technologies than…

Presenter profiles – ForestTECH 2019 ForestTECH 2019, this region’s annual gathering of resource managers, remote sensing, GIS and mapping specialists, inventory foresters and technology providers into this part of the…

Every year, over 250 resource managers, remote sensing, GIS and mapping specialists, inventory foresters and technology providers from throughout Australasia (and more recently SE Asia) meet up at the annual…

Airborne Lidar has revolutionised area-wide 3D data for topography, vegetation, buildings and infrastructure. This article is a good overview of the evolution of sensors and aircraft technology. It also highlights…

The New Zealand workforce has stood out in a new multinational employee survey for their ‘fearless acceptance’ of new technology. New data released by global technology firm Genesys shows Kiwi…

University of Wollongong bushfire management researcher Owen Price has developed a new method for mapping bushfire risk based on past fire patterns which has the potential to change bushfire prevention…

Precision agriculture has considerably benefited from the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, often combined with active ranging sensors like Lidar to gather information from underneath the crops, but existing systems…

Precision forestry technology is moving forward at an amazing pace, with advancements in global positioning systems, remote sensing platforms and data sources, cloud geospatial engines, mobile GIS data collectors and…

iXblue Pty Ltd, Brisbane, Australia, part of iXblue Group based in France, has diversified its Sea Operations division operational capability to include aerial mapping operations to clients across Australia, New…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.news. It has been a busy month and we have a wealth of stories in this issue. First up, is the release of the…

Towards the end of last year we covered an article about a Seattle Startup company, DroneSeed that was automating tree planting and spraying operations using drones. Their custom UAV platforms,…

A shirt with built-in sensors could help reduce fatalities in New Zealand’s forestry industry. Researchers at the University of Waikato are developing a hi-tech way to keep forestry workers safe…

The Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) used BVLOS drones to carry out tree-wise forest inventory on an area of 18,000 hectares in North-West Russia. A huge need exists for up-to-date,…

Every year, over 250 resource managers, remote sensing, GIS and mapping specialists, inventory foresters and technology providers from throughout Australasia (and more recently SE Asia) meet up at the annual…

This year, NASA is celebrating the 50thanniversary of the first crewed mission to land on the moon. In September, it will also be 60 years since the first unmanned mission…

There are a few companies with the resources and clout to make rapid advances in the drone industry – and Google spin-off Wing is one of them. Wing, which has…

New research has demonstrated that forestry field operators can accurately perform certain tree stem assessments in an immersive, virtual reality (VR) environment. Consequent benefits to industry could range from improved…

Finland is a land of forests, covering up to 75% of the country. Naturally, forestry is a major industry – but resources are hard to measure. Helsinki-based forestry tech startup…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.news. The highly anticipated programme for November’s ForestTECH 2019 series will be released later this month. Event registrations will also open shortly, with big…

To capitalise on those travelling through to Rotorua, New Zealand and/or Melbourne, Australia to attend ForestTECH 2019 this year, a series of four practical workshops have been set up with…

The median price of forestry farms across New Zealand has increased by 45% over the last year from NZ$6,487 per hectare to NZ$9,394 per hectare according to the Real Estate…

Precision agriculture has considerably benefited from the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, often combined with active ranging sensors like Lidar to gather information from underneath the crops, but existing systems…

Lim Geomatics is proud to unveil Prism, a next-generation timber cruising application that dramatically enhances how foresters collect and analyze data from the field. The cloud-based digital tool is easy…

A Robinson R22 helicopter was converted by UAVOS to an unmanned drone. UAVOS— which specializes in the design, development and manufacturing of unmanned vehicles and autopilot systems — successfully completed in-air programmed missions with…

SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, successfully launched in May its first five dozen Starlink telecommunications satellites. This is the first step in the Starlink project, which aims…

The world’s first two automated logging truck scalers, commissioned by Mount Maunganui-based ISO Limited, are now scanning logs at Port of Tauranga, New Zealand. The Robotic Scaling Machines (RSM) give…

Amazon has unveiled the latest version of its Prime Air delivery drone, a hybrid aircraft that’s capable of vertical takeoff and landing as well as sustained forward flight. The company says…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.news. As mentioned last month, we have started working on the programmes for this November’s ForestTECH 2019 series. Programmes for both Australia and New…

Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA) hosted a launch event in Melbourne on Tuesday evening, unveiling a new brand to the industry ahead of a consumer advertising campaign next month.…

Europe is readying a new fleet of satellites that will monitor CO2 emissions at every point on earth, creating the first worldwide system to independently track polluters. The fleet of…

Victoria’s largest ever acquisition of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data across 1.35 million hectares of Victorian public forests has just commenced. This work will provide important information for supporting…

The Bay of Plenty is one of the eight regions that will receive co-funding from the Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) to obtain LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) elevation datasets. Eight…

DJI, the world’s leader in civilian drones and aerial imaging technology, today introduced DJI Terra, a new software tool that transforms drone data into digital 3D models and maps for…

In Waypoint’s newest segment, Ask Andrea, senseFly’s Product and Training Manager, Andrea Blindenbacher, answers questions on launching and landing a mapping drone, such as why it’s important to take off…

This article relates to how young tech savvy graduates are now being attracted to the oil and gas industry. Transpose the oil and gas industry to forestry. There is an…

Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.news. ForestTECH 2019, Australasia’s premier forestry technology series, will be running again for forest resource managers, planners, inventory foresters and GIS and mapping specialists.…

ForestTECH is this region’s premier technology series. It’s run for Australasia’s forest resource managers, planners, inventory foresters and GIS and mapping specialists by the Forest Industry Engineering Association (FIEA). Since…

New research into Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a growth driver for Australian businesses, today revealed that just over half of Australian organisations (54%) have started to adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI)…

By 2021, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will allow the rate of innovation in New Zealand to double. Employee productivity gains are also expected to increase 1.5 times, according to a new…

The arrival of airborne Lidar, also referred to as airborne laser scanning (ALS), has revolutionized area-wide 3D data acquisition of topography, bathymetry, vegetation, buildings and infrastructure. This article presents an…

A free online platform has just been launched to connect New Zealand businesses with funders, incubators, multinationals and other collaborators. Scale-Up NZ, from Callaghan Innovation, shines a light on our…

Google’s parent company has launched a world-first commercial air delivery business in Canberra’s north, delivering gelato and golfing equipment by drone directly to homes. Wing, run by Google’s overarching company…

Forestry software company Treemetrics intends to double, if not treble, its workforce over the coming 12 to 18 months as it embarks on a plan to drive revenues from €1…

Lim Geomatics is thrilled to play a part in the next chapter of Canadian innovation that will see homegrown companies play a much bigger role in the world economy for…

Welcome to this latest issue of www.foresttech.news. Thanks for the feedback on the new video section of our website. Videos drawn from recent presentations at ForestTECH events (with speaker approval)…

This web map compares Pre and Post fire, 3m resolution satellite imagery, of the of the Pigeon Valley Fire 2019, Nelson area. The imagery uses the near-infrared band. Using this…

In a paper first published in Nature.com, the authors discuss an interesting applied technology use case, using both drone data collection and AI to allow for the more frequent and…

Showcased at a press conference in Barcelona, Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 augmented reality headset promises more features, better virtual and augmented displays, and a more comfortable experience when wearing the headset.…

Esri, the global leader in location intelligence, has just announced a partnership with 3LOG Systems, the makers of the preeminent log inventory management solution in the world forestry marketplace. Together,…

Guest post by Mark Sheehan, My Drone Authority With the global increase in demand for clean food and other agricultural products, Australian farmers and ranchers are finding that drones are…

Trimble has announced a new wearable hard hat compatible device that enables workers in safety-controlled environments to access holographic information on the worksite—the Trimble® XR10 with HoloLens 2. In addition,…

CSIRO’s Data61 has announced the opening of its new Robotics Innovation Centre in Queensland, a purpose-built research facility for robotics and autonomous systems, an industry set to be worth AU$23…

Welcome to this latest issue of www.foresttech.news. We brought forward the second issue for the year as we’ve been inundated with forest resource management, remote sensing and inventory management stories.…

During a disastrous event such as a major hurricane, wildfire, catastrophic flooding or a destructive earthquake, first responders must quickly understand the magnitude and the nature of the event and…

Developing tree breakage models is a key parameter in the modelling of forest yield.   To model the height at which a stem breaks during harvesting and before log-making can start,…

During FPT Industrial’s Tech day, FPT Industrial and Forvola broke the Guinness World Record for the heaviest payload lifted by a drone. With 16 propellers giving it enough oomph to…

It’s been a big year for Airobotics.  The Israeli company which is the best known fully automated drone solution in the world has received a major funding boost; opened a U.S.…

The Landsat satellites provide an uninterrupted space-based data record of the Earth’s land surface to help advance scientific research towards understanding our changing planet. In this article, the authors look…

Delair, a leading supplier of commercial drone solutions, has unveiled Delair Aerial Intelligence, a comprehensive platform for converting drone-based images into actionable business insights. The new cloud-based solution provides a…

Skylogic Research, the leading commercial drone industry research and advisory services firm, just announced the release of their latest research on commercial drone operations. The Economics of Using Drones for…

The Rural Intelligence Platform is the first ever software to comprehensively assess and monitor rural land anywhere in Australia, drawing on information from trusted data sources on productivity, water access,…

Welcome to this year’s first issue of this region’s forest inventory and remote sensing newsletter, www.foresttech.news.  Other than those unfortunately having to work on fire duty (and many of you still…

Society is undergoing enormous disruption due to the continuous adoption of new digital technology and the forest industry is poised to take advantage of some of these. But successful replacement…

If you don’t think drone deliveries are going to take off (excuse the pun), think again. While the U.S. and Europe inch closer to drone delivery, China is racing ahead.…

Israeli drone provider Airobotics has secured the first-ever approval by Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority to operate drones beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) from a remote operations centre. In…

Finnish pilot develops new solution for sustainable forestry Europe is feverishly looking for new ways to use farm, forest and fishery resources more responsibly and sustainably and to promote the…

Land Information New Zealand develops tool to enable public to help fight spread of wilding conifers, which can threaten productive farmland, native ecosystems, tourism, economy; Wilding Watch can be used…

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…

Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, has announced that it would be extending its Earth observation capabilities by acquiring Australia’s first CubeSat designed to detect invisible infrared light. To be known…

Hitting the ground running in 2019, dronelife.com started a timely conversation this year about the key trends in the commercial drone industry to focus on. As the industry consolidates the market will…

Scion, New Zealand’s CRI for forestry and wood products,has a new top-of-the line lidar scanner – the Riegl MiniVUX-1 UAV Snoopy V-series manufactured by LidarUSA. The new piece of equipment…

Using voxel-based analysis of aerial lidar is a promising new development in remote sensing. In the past, high-density lidar has largely been restricted to terrestrial laser scanners. Now, high-density scanners…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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 inventory methods…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 algorithms account for…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 activities including ecology…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

Every year it’s the one event that draws in forest resource managers, remote sensing, GIS and mapping specialists and inventory foresters together. It’s the annual technology programme run at the…

Not far from Tel Aviv a drone flies low over a gritty landscape of warehouses and broken pavement. It slowly approaches its home — a refrigerator-sized box inside a mesh…

Welcome to the 15th monthly issue of ForestTECH News Every month, numbers of forest resource managers, remote sensing and mapping and GIS specialists, inventory foresters, researchers and key product and service…