Presenter profiles – ForestTECH 2019

In Event, Issue29 by FIEA

ForestTECH 2019, this region’s annual gathering of resource managers, remote sensing, GIS and mapping specialists, inventory foresters and technology providers into this part of the forestry industry, runs again in November. Full details on the programmes along with details on the four workshops being run in conjunction with this year’s series, can be found on the event website; ForestTECH.events. This week we profile some more of this year’s presentations.

Mark Noonan, NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, Australia

Incendo is a low-cost and innovative spatial web and mobile tool for managing bushfire risk on New South Wale’s Crown Land estate. The tool is a live bushfire management plan that provides the latest information from multiple sources to bushfire officers across NSW. In this presentation you will learn how Crown Lands moved from a desktop environment to a fully mobile and web-based system in under 3 months.

Shaun McBride, Thinxtra, New Zealand

Real-World Applications for the Internet of Things in Forestry Operations. In the last couple of years most of the discussions on IoT where about how this new technology could impact the Forestry Industry – now we are seeing with real life forestry IoT deployments the impact this is making. Shaun will cover an overview of IoT developments and real-world examples of how it is being used in both forestry and other industries with similar working conditions.

Grant Pearse, Scion Research, New Zealand

New methods are emerging from the field of data science that could revolutionize remote sensing approaches. However, these new deep learning methods are not optimised for use in remote sensing and can struggle with geospatial data.

This presentation will cover recent work done by Scion research to re-purpose these algorithms for use with low-cost UAV imagery. The accuracy and transferability of the resulting models exceeded all other approaches tested at Scion and can be readily transferred to end-users.

Sean Krisanski, University of Tasmania, Australia

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are conventionally used above the forest canopy, however, in areas of dense canopy cover, photogrammetry and even multi-echo LiDAR can be limited in how much detail it can capture from the sub-canopy due to canopy occlusion. This project focuses on exploring how UAVs can be applied beneath the forest canopy to capture information from areas which were previously difficult to map. This presentation will focus on the learnings and advancements made in the project since this publication.

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