Welcome to the latest issue of Foresttech.News.
Interest in this year’s ForestTECH 2022 series being run for New Zealand and Australian resource and tree crop managers is now starting to really ramp up. Three years of not meeting face-to-face in Australia and two years in New Zealand, is just one of the many reasons our ForestTECH community is getting in early. Content and the technology on show, of course, is another reason for the keen interest.
One of the presentations planned this year at ForestTECH 2022 is from Scion, who together with a NZ forest products company, have been working on packaging up a number of new technologies (increasing the pruning height to 10m using robotic pruning, predicting the optimal planting locations for planting, automated release spraying using one set of GPS coordinates for tree locations …) to enable forest management decisions to be made for individual trees. The payback – when used together – potentially a 7% improvement in final crop value per hectare across the forest estate.
Being right in the middle of our planting season, we cover efforts this month being made in Australia – and the soaring demand for tree stocks. Replanting areas lost in the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires is now in full swing with a third of FCNSW’s plantations lost to fire around the Tumut and Tumbarumba areas. As a consequence, the planting programme has doubled this year with around 6.5 million trees being planted between May and late August. And in Western Australia, it’s not so much replacement of fire-damaged areas, but companies planting trees to capture carbon and generate carbon offsets, that’s really putting pressure on local nurseries to supply tree stocks this year.
In other stories, Microsoft is teaming up with NZ Crown Research Institute, Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research to develop improved detection of land use and forest cover change in New Zealand. And in Tasmania, LiDAR, satellite data, drone footage, high-resolution photography and other spatial data are being combined to produce a life-scale 4D map (known as Digital Twin) of Tasmania for future resource planning.
Check out these stories, videos and much more below. Enjoy this month’s issue.
Stories this issue:
- US$36m raised for drone reforestation efforts
- NZ’s forest cover change being mapped
- Australia’s first 4D digital mapping project
- NSW planting efforts doubling in size this year
- Precision Forestry: A forest of one
- Ultra-long range hydraulic drone lifts serious weight
- Soaring demand for trees to offset Australia’s emissions
- Monitoring system for sensitive environments
- Drones – heading towards a futuristic vision
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