Hong Kong venture capital fund Beyond Ventures has joined with Linear Capital of Shanghai to lead a US$9 million investment that will benefit forestry in national parks and other natural resources all over the world. They are funding Insight Robotics, which pursues a mission to facilitate risk management of the world’s assets by generating and making sense of data. Other …
New tool to predict forestry climate change
Forest managers will be able to gauge the likely effect of climate change on growing conditions in their specific areas with a new interactive online tool developed by the CSIRO with funding from Forest & Wood Products Australia. The free Forest Climate Risk Tool provides information on factors such as the likely periods of drought, rainfall, number of heatwave days, …
Drone test for replanting forests
The massive task of restoring land denuded by fires, drought or human activity might eventually be helped by swarms of drones that can plant almost 400,000 tree seeds a day. “There’s an absolutely huge, huge area across Canada in need of … reforestation activities,” Lauren Fletcher, chief executive of England’s BioCarbon Engineering, said after a recent demonstration of his company’s …
Infrared sensing gives drones a new edge
An ‘x-ray vision system’ that overlays three specific technologies to assess the structure and health of individual trees in plantation forests through the canopy is being developed in South Australia. University of South Australia autonomous systems expert Professor Anthony Finn said an infrared sensor gave the drone the “x-ray vision” to see through forest canopies. The collaboration between the forest …
Lidar Market Heading towards 2 Billion Dollars by 2023
According to a comprehensive new market research report, the overall Lidar market is expected to reach over US$1.8 billion by 2023, up from US$819.1 million in 2018, at a CAGR of 17.2%. Encouragement from the governments and institutes for the adoption of Lidar while conducting geological surveys is the major factor driving the growth of this market. Introduction of technologically …
Tiny RoboFly could sniff out forest fires
This is one flying insect you don’t want to swat. It doesn’t bite, sting, or spread disease and someday it could be a life and climate saver. In time, it could survey crops, detect wildfires, poke around in disaster rubble searching for survivors and sniff out gas leaks, especially global warming-fueling methane, a powerful greenhouse gas many times more potent …
Expressions of Interest – ForestTECH 2018
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 2007, it’s the one event every year that focuses on this particular part of the forestry industry. Forest owners, forestry mangers, key researchers and technology providers are also now picking …
Terrestrial Laser Scanning in Forest Inventories
Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is an effective technique for acquiring detailed tree attributes in forest plots. During the last two decades, national mapping agencies, companies, universities and research organisations have put tremendous effort into developing methods for tree attribute estimation using TLS. There is, however, still a lack of proper understanding on TLS performance. Different data collection methods and processing …
New lab immerses users in environment of Agumented Reality
The Lab, which is part of CSIRO’s new $100M research facility in Canberra, will allow researchers to develop new interactive computer graphics and computational imaging services, which will redefine industries including retail, agriculture, manufacturing, health and construction. Senior Research Engineer and Experimental Scientist at CSIRO’s Data61 Matt Adcock, said AR and VR technology would change the way Australians interact with …