ForestTECH News Issue 24 Summary

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. At this stage, we’re now calling for early expressions of interest to present at this year’s November event. If interested, please contact the Programme Manager, brent.apthorp@fiea.org.nz BEFORE Friday 24 May.

In this month’s news, a major report recently released, was Microsoft’s ‘Future Ready Business: Assessing Asia Pacific’s Growth Potential Through AI’. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to double the rate of innovation in New Zealand and Australia by 2021, only 51% of NZ companies and 54% of Australian companies have started to adopt AI as part of their business strategy.

As we have discussed in previous updates, UAVs, both operationally and technically, have continued their exponential growth for use in forest management over the last few years. In this issue, we cover the approval in Australia of the world’s first commercial drone delivery of food and medicine. In another report, recent developments in airborne lidar are covered.

We also take a look at Canada’s new forestry supercluster which includes The Forest Machine Connectivity project, a joint effort by Canfor, TimberWest, Lim Geomatics, FP Innovations, and UBC’s Faculty of Forestry, the launch of NZ’s innovation gateway and we cover big plans for Ireland’s forest tech innovator, Treemetrics, one of the earlier tech companies profiled as part of the ForestTECH series in this part of the world.