The Digital Forester

Doug Jones, Senior Vice President of Remsoft, joins us from Fredericton, NB to kick off Season 2 of the Digital Forester podcast. Doug shares his thoughts on digital transformation, precision forestry, connected digital supply chains, data standardization and interoperability, analytics and AI, the cloud, and of course, optimization technologies. Come listen to why Doug says that we are in the middle of a forestry revolution.

Gaetan Pelletier is the Executive Director of the Northern Hardwoods Research Institute in Edmundston, New Brunswick. With over 30 years of forestry experience, Gaetan reflects on some of the key technologies that have digitally transformed the forest industry. Lidar, drones, SLAM, and harvester heads are all areas of applied research that excites Gaetan and keeps him from ever considering retirement. With AI “black boxes”, Gaetan reminds us that we still need to be able to explain model outputs and there is no better way of doing that than getting out in the woods.

Mike Sutton is the Manager of Innovation & Research at the Forestry Corporation of NSW in Australia. Mike, who started his career at a time where there was only one satellite in space and where rugged data bricks that could be driven over by cars was considered high-tech, joins us to share his journey with innovation. Have a listen about his work with and thoughts about drones, airborne and UAV lidar, mobile mapping, app development, GNSS, autonomous vehicles, and virtual reality. Mike believes we are not too far away from working at the individual tree given all the technology that is available today.

Joining us from South Africa, in between writing his Ph.D. thesis, Simon Ackerman, CTO of Forest Operations Research at Stellenbosch University, shares with us his knowledge and experiences as it relates to improving the productivity and performance of cut-to-length (CTL) forest machinery for operational efficiency gains. The importance of training and having a skilled workforce to operate forest machinery is highlighted, as well as the shift towards more automation.

From his treehouse in Sweden, Johan Ekenstedt, Founder of Arboreal, shares with us how he leveraged the lidar and augmented reality capabilities of smartphones to provide foresters a simple way of measuring tree heights and DBH. As a startup in the app space, Johan reflects on what he had to do to get the US Army to approve Arboreal’s apps and his thoughts on the changes proposed for the Apple Apps and Google Play stores.

Cam Brown is the Strategic Planning Forester at Forsite, which is a full-service forest management company that employs over 150 people from Halifax to Vancouver Island. He joins us to talk about their individual tree lidar forest inventory technology, the concept of a hybridized lidar forest inventory, cloud computing in AWS, and their innovative forestry software tools and solutions. Come listen to Cam share his thoughts on why he thinks we’ll know where every stick is at every point in time in the not-so-distant future.

From New Zealand, to Laos, to the UK, to Guyana and back to New Zealand, Dr. Pete Watt, Team Leader, Resource Monitoring & Climate Change at Indufor Asia Pacific Ltd., joins us from Auckland to share his insights on how forest intelligence can be created through actionable analytics from earth observation data to routinely monitor forest and landscape environments. Come listen to how Indufor uses earth observation, Google Cloud Platform, and deep learning for resource monitoring at national scales.

Enda Keane, CEO of Treemetrics, pioneered the Internet of Trees (IoT) concept and was an early adopter of all things lidar, forest inventory, harvesting machine telematics, and satellite mapping technologies. Treemetrics is the developers of ForestHQ, a forest management solution, and ForestBidder, an online marketplace for forest auctions. Enda is excited about the field measurement capabilities offered through the iPhone 12, new satellites dedicated to forestry applications, and the possible use of NFTs in carbon markets.

Max Nova, COO of NCX (FKA SilviaTerra), shares with us how he met Zach Parisa, CEO of NCX, at the Yale School of Forestry and how that friendship and collaboration would lead to the development of the Plot Hound and CruiseBoost technology, the first ever high resolution forest map of the contiguous United States (powered by Microsoft AI for Earth), and the decision to raise Seed and Series A funding to pivot and focus on their vision of a natural capital exchange where forests are valued not only for timber but their ecosystem services as well. Max reminds us that there is only one forest carbon project and it is called Planet Earth.

With 25 years of experience in forestry, Phil Green from First Resource Management Group (FRMG) talks to us about his company’s role in managing eight million hectares of public forests and how those experiences led to the development of the SkyForest forest inventory and FireFringe fire-mapping technology. The need for more investment in forest technology in Canada is touched on as well as the importance of whole-planet monitoring using earth observation (EO) as people’s concern with climate change grows. Who knows, maybe EO data products will evolve to become non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that leverage blockchain technology in the Web 3.0 future.