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 as CSIROSat-1, the new satellite will allow researchers from CSIRO and other institutions to ‘see’ features that can’t otherwise be seen using satellite imagery in the visible spectrum. Although the …

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 has higher resolution and accuracy than Scion’s current scanner, and has an increased range. Being able to capture data at greater than 60 m above ground (and up to 120 …

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 are being mounted on helicopters and UAVs flying close to the tops of forests to provide very fine-scale imagery of trees. This kind of scanning generates very dense point clouds …

At Amsterdam Drone Week, James Burgess of Google X spinoff Wing showed a system of drone delivery that’s made over 2500 customer flights in a test outside of Canberra, Australia. In the last nine months, Wing – graduated from Project X and now independent under parent company Alphabet – has worked on a widespread test of drone delivery in a …

SimActive is a leading developer of photogrammetry software. The Canadian company, which was founded by two brothers – Louis and Philippe Simard – in 2003, celebrates its 15th anniversary this year. GIM International recently interviewed Philippe Simard about the recent developments in digital photogrammetry, the company’s flagship product Correlator3D, automated classification of point clouds, the influence of drones in the …

Wildfires are consuming North American forests and grasslands faster than we can replace them. It’s a vicious cycle of destruction and inadequate restoration rooted, so to speak, in decades of neglect of the institutions and technologies needed to keep these environments healthy. DroneSeed is a Seattle-based start-up that aims to combat this growing problem with a modern toolkit that scales: …

Many of us will have watched TV or movie dramas where a bunch of luckless travellers get totally lost in a dense forest. They hear the unmistakable sound of a helicopter nearby and start waving frantically. Most often, the rescuers will fail to see them and the life-threatening adventure starts anew. Being unable to spot hikers under a thick canopy …

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 and sampling designs can estimate variables such as height, volume, basal area and number of trees fairly accurately, if enough sampling plots are included, but this approach is labour-intensive and …

Forget the across-the-ditch rivalry: New Zealanders, Australians and Americans are working together to launch a fleet of satellites to power the world’s global IoT communications from space. Rocket Lab and Australian IoT startup Fleet Space Technologies have signed a contract to launch two Proxima satellites this month. The satellites are the first of a series of small, low-cost satellites that …

What’s the single most important factor to help facilitate a successful fixed-wing UAV flight? It’s a question we get a lot from UAV (drone) operators across the world. And while it would be great to point to just one thing you could do to ensure every flight is a success, the reality is that there are many factors that contribute …

A new NASA laser instrument set to launch to the International Space Station in December will help scientists create the first three-dimensional map of the world’s temperate and tropical forests. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, or GEDI, is scheduled to launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. From the station, GEDI’s advanced laser technology will reveal the three-dimensional structure of forest …

Councils in New Zealand that can’t afford three-dimensional mapping of their territories stand to gain from a NZ$19 million grant from the Provincial Growth Fund. Land Information and Economic Development ministers Eugenie Sage and Shane Jones announced the decision to increase funding for so-called LiDAR, or 3D, mapping because of the need for a national database to assist with land …

Delair has announced a new drone platform specifically optimized for the agriculture and forest industry, the Delair UX11 Ag. Built on the foundation of the successful Delair UX11 fixed-wing UAV, the new version combines the productivity benefits of long-range/BVLOS flight operations with highly accurate survey-grade mapping and plant data collection capabilities – all in an easy-to-use platform – to enable …

Placed first in Australia and 20th in the world in the 2016 QS University Rankings, Australian National University (ANU) is a research institution with its main campus in Canberra, the country’s capital. Research currently underway in a joint effort between ANU and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is tracking tree growth and development over time using GeoSLAM’s …

The Centre for Space Science Technology (CSST) and Airbus Defence and Space have announced a partnership agreement, which will give New Zealand businesses, industry, government and the research community access to an even wider selection of high resolution, weather independent, near real-time satellite imagery. “In the past, New Zealand has lagged behind other nations in our application of Earth observation …

After a successful release in Australia, Universal Forest Systems has announced that they will be launching the Forest Inventory Reporting System (FIRS) in New Zealand at the Foresttech conference in November. “FIRS is an innovative end-to-end solution for designing forest inventories, capturing data, analysing the captured data and reporting the results” says Ashley Goldstraw, Forestry Apps Developer for Universal Forest …