In early March, professional foresters and operations managers from Canada’s leading forest companies will be treated to an international selection of innovative systems for enhancing forest management and log values. ForestTECHX 2018 is an international forest technology conference running on March 6-7th at the Executive Airport Plaza Hotel in Richmond, near Vancouver Airport.
Program manager for ForestTECHX, John Stulen says, “Based on the feedback from our focus group for this conference we chose to cover technologies in two key areas – stand measurement and log value improvement.”
“We then focused on forest measurement technologies that bring practical benefits to the practicing foresters out in the woods. Adding to that we have people whose log value enhancing systems are already delivering better log grades from harvesting operations.”
In the geomatics field, ForestTECHX will have several leading providers showcasing their systems. The Leading Edge Geomatics (LEG) team has developed a LiDAR and imagery-derived management solution, integrating their system of enhanced forest inventory (EFI) with LiDAR terrain and surface products. The system greatly diminishes the historic dependency on manually interpreted forest stands, as well as assumptions of uniform forest compositions.
LEG’s forest management solution is designed to support decision making for strategic, tactical, and operational forest management. It allows managers to gather data quickly, and implement it seamlessly into both daily operations and long-term planning. EFI metrics are produced promptly, and yield accurate results accounting for within stand variation as well as stand-to-stand variability.
The LEG metrics systems accurately describe tree height, base to live crown, basal area, diameter, density, volume, piece size, diameter distributions and cover type. Their people work continuously with forest professionals to improve their system deliverables and to provide the information that people in the woods need to stay competitive.
The team from Object Raku Technologies will talk about how their systems are being applied in forest operations. Remote sensing technologies are enabling more efficient and profitable forestry operations. This presentation will examine case studies of operational use in BC and California, and discuss accuracy and applications of the data.
One case study will show how advanced forest inventories can be created to describe stand characteristics similar to what would have required ground based timber cruising in the past. Using custom software and aerial laser scanning data (LiDAR) with 8-10 point per square metre or better, individual tree inventories can be created that provide species, height, diameter, and volumes for each tree over large areas (landscapes). Tree data is then aggregated into operational stand polygons for stand and stock tables and summaries of log product volumes by species.
The 2018 ForestTECHX conference runs 6-7th March at the Executive Airport Plaza Hotel in Richmond, BC. For full details to register see: https://foresttechx.events