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 method for acquiring forest data. A new service offered by Katam Technologies utilises autonomous drones to complement manual measurements of tree trunk diameter. With this new solution, forest owners and …
Where’s My Drone? BVLOS for forest operations
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 complexity of technical, operational, and regulatory considerations in a forest environment and it becomes a challenge to operate UAVs in forestry when visual contact is not maintained. A recently published …
Timberlands’ big, hairy, audacious goal
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 they stood on the top of a hill in Puruki they could see their own Kaingaroa Forest estate, just 20 kilometres to the east and they knew that they needed …
New biomass satellite taking shape
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 cleanroom in Stevenage, the European Space Agency’s BIOMASS satellite is finally taking shape. And as science missions go, it’s a big one. The spacecraft is several metres high and weighs …
Forest establishment & mechanised planting profiled
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 and researchers from throughout Australasia. For the last two years, tree crop, forest establishment and silvicultural managers have also been involved as part of this annual series. In the last …
Glyphosate not carcinogenic, says EU chemicals agency
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 a scientific opinion published by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). The agency’s Committee for Risk Assessment found that “the available scientific evidence did not meet the criteria to classify glyphosate …
DNA – transforming the fight against illegal logging
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. In the summer of 2018, Justin Wilke, a Washington man in his late-thirties, found what seemed like the perfect candidate for poaching: a big-leaf maple located about a quarter mile …
Jetson ONE – World’s first EVTOL work trip
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 screens, the Jetsons), a Swedish company with a mission of making the skies available for everyone with their safe personal electric aerial vehicles. They were flying the vehicle through the …