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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …