Welcome to the first issue of the ForestTECH newsletter for this year. Good to be back at work? Amazingly, already a month of the year has flown by. To start the year, we’ve added a number of remote sensing stories to this issue – all of which were touched on as part of the ForestTECH 2017 series that ran at the back end of 2017.
In the drone or UAV space, researchers at the University of British Columbia have been using drones to investigate just how much damage the 2017 wildfire season wreaked on B.C.’s forests. In New Zealand, like Australia, drone flights have been increasing exponentially. The number of flights recorded by Airways has jumped from 30 to around 600 each week over the past three years. Airways has just partnered with global airspace management provider AirMap to deliver the country’s first UAV traffic management (UTM) platform. It’s designed to provide flight planning and management tools for commercial and recreational UAV pilots with the three-month trial underway in the Canterbury and Queenstown regions.
The story that really struck a chord recently though was the two American companies, one manufacturing small manned planes and the other, designing and manufacturing commercial drones who have put their heads together. Work has started on designing the world’s first autonomous air tanker that’s going to be capable of delivering some 800 gallons of water or fire retardant to help fire-fighters battle wild fires.
Other stories include comparisons of airborne Lidar and photogrammetric point clouds, an update of an international study that’s reviewing recent developments of terrestrial laser scanning in plot inventories and a report on the rapid rise and projected market value (a US$45 billion industry by 2038) of agri-robots.
Enjoy this month’s tech update. Remember, if you have a story or article or link that you can share, if you have just published some research in this area and would like another platform to disseminate information to your peers or to the wider industry or if you have information on a new product or innovation that you’d like to share, get in touch by emailing: brent.apthorp@innovatek.co.nz.
Stories this issue:
- Autonomous air tankers for firefighting?
- Comparing Lidar & Photogrammetric Point Clouds
- Agri Robots & Drones to be a US$45 Billion Industry by 2038
- Study identifies opportunities for NSW forest owners
- Drones used to survey B.C.’s wildfire damage
- Terrestrial laser scanning for forest inventories
- NZ to trial drone traffic management system
- Satellite technology a game changer for NZ farmers
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An archived version of this issue is also available.
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