A Record Global Turnout In the lead up to ForestTECH 2020, most within the industry would have thought that it would have been a very hard (in fact, nigh near impossible) task to get forestry resource and tree crop managers together from across Australasia at any physical event. Despite COVID-19, country border restrictions, tight health and safety requirements for running …

With the introduction of environmental policies comes an increasing need to monitor changes across landscapes. While high revisit satellite data is touted as providing such a solution; it is often difficult to cope with the volumes of data, filter and interpret changes in a structured way. Indufor’s monitoring system, ‘MO’ presents a rapid, scalable approach to landscape-level change detection. ‘MO’ …

A solar-powered, unmanned aircraft is being developed in Christchurch, New Zealand in the hope it will be a game changer for the aerial imaging industry. Kea Aerospace is developing the Kea Atmos aircraft, which has a wingspan of 32m and weighs only 90kg. Covered in solar panels which power three electric motors, the aircraft will be able to fly for …

Dryad Networks is prepping an IoT network of sensors connected via a solar-powered wireless mesh for deployment in forests as an early warning system to detect fires. A German start-up wants to use IoT sensors and a wireless-mesh network to detect forest fires within 10 minutes to an hour of when they start as opposed to the hours or even …

Drones becoming a useful tool in wildfire meteorology, the effort to understand weather that leads to fire risk. As wildfires continue to rage across vast swaths of the western United States, researchers are developing the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to understand the weather systems that lead to the fires’ ignition and spread and to help develop tools to …

Much has been reported on the development and advancements of local research efforts into robotics and automated data capture for forest operations. Elsewhere, USA-based company Treeswift provides an example of how researchers in other parts of the world are embracing the use of robotic tools to help automate forestry, reduce risk for workers, and collect highly accurate data more quickly. …

One benefit of high-revisit satellites is their ability to re-image the same location daily or weekly. In this example, we use temporal satellite observations (2016 to 2020) to track drought impact, using PlanetScope imagery to confirm the change. Working with Scion’s Geomatics team, Indufor has extended the science and developed a monitoring approach that can be used to link satellite …

As wildfires continue to ravage vast swaths of land across the western United States unmanned aerial vehicle operators are stepping up to provide critical services, acting as eyes in the skies in support of firefighting teams on the ground. Flying two hybrid quadrotor (HQ) aircraft manufactured by L3Harris Technologies, Belgrade, Montana-based Bridger Aerospace, has flown some 250 hours in about …

Editors Note: Aerometrex is also a sponsor of ForestTECH 2020 and will present this exciting new innovation in detail at the conference. Aerometrex has just announced that it’s developed a new technology that can determine, in three dimensions, the exact fuel load densities in any bushfire-prone region in Australia. The product is an advance of the company’s existing LIDAR (Light …

Emesent is an innovative Australian data analytics and drone autonomy start-up. The company presented at last year’s ForestTECH 2019 event and will again be presenting at this years ForestTECH 2020 event scheduled to run on 18-19 November. Soon after last year’s ForestTECH event in Rotorua, Scion undertook trials using the Hovermap sensor unit which integrates with a drone flight control …