Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News.
In last month’s issue, we announced that the ForestTECH 2022 event had just been set up for forest resource and tree crop managers in New Zealand and Australia. It’s been a long time coming and will run in both countries in November. In keeping with one of the two key themes for ForestTECH, we also profiled a review of mechanical or robotic tree pruning systems and a Swedish trial underway with a 6-metre diameter drone being used to thin forest stands from the air.
This month, and again, keeping with the theme of precision silviculture, we cover several stories relating to developments around automating forest establishment. Work on an autonomous tree planting machine, AutoPlant, is still ongoing with further trials of the autonomous base unit and a prototype of the planting head underway. The Forestry Research Institute of Sweden has also received funding to develop a remote-controlled scarifier and it’s just been announced that Komatsu Forest will be acquiring the Swedish company, Bracke Forest AB, which manufactures application-specific attachments for silviculture including mechanised planting heads.
Much closer to home, newly published research by Te Uru Rākau – New Zealand Forest Service has come up with suggested strategies to successfully plant trees outside of the normal planting season. They’ve provided guidelines to foresters on how to safely hold back trees in nurseries without impacting on their quality. Key research findings have been inserted into easy-to-read factsheets and can be found in the article below.
And, if you haven’t seen them yet, we’ve built in a couple of short videos for you this month; one showing the collection of seeds from ash eucalypts to regenerate Victoria’s ash forests decimated by bushfires and the other, it highlights how mobile terrestrial LiDAR data and ground-based measurements have been collected across coastal NSW native forests as part of a small pilot programme.
Check out these stories, videos and much more below. Enjoy this month’s issue.
Stories this issue:
- Drone planting 40,000 tree pods a day
- Planting trees outside the normal planting season
- Komatsu Forest to acquire Bracke Forest
- Mobile terrestrial laser scanning of NSW native forests
- EPA approves wilding conifer weedkiller
- Ash forests to forests of ash
- Development of a remote-controlled scarifier
- Carbon sequestration – how does NZ redwood stack?
- AutoPlant – is this going to be planting this year?
If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to this email newsletter.
Share this Post
