The Digital Forester

Chad St.Amand from Millar Western Forest Products (MWFP) joins us to share his forestry journey from British Columbia to Ontario to Alberta, Canada and his lessons learned as an early adopter of airborne lidar, drones, enterprise GIS, and mobile technology. Other forestry companies look to MWFP to understand how they made their technology stack work, which is comprised of Oracle, Trimble Forestry LRM, Esri ArcGIS Enterprise, Survey123, and Field Maps, and Lim Geomatics’ AFRIDS and Op Tracker. Having just invested in an airborne lidar data collection for over 1 million hectares, MWFP continues to blaze the trail forward with digital transformation but also emphasizes that success is ultimately tied back to having boots on the ground.

Southern Forestry Consultants president Michael Dooner and Mike Berzinis, Director of Geospatial Solutions, talk about natural resources management and digital transformation underway in forestry in the US southeast. The importance of partnerships and education are highlighted as critical to enabling a single source of truth for data-driven forestry. In this podcast, SFC shares how they use GIS and cloud technology to deliver exponentially better tools for the foresters they serve, all the while keeping things easy and simple.

Murray Woods, Principal Consultant at Treedimensions, shares his experiences with and thoughts about airborne, terrestrial and hand-held lidar, single photon lidar, lidar enhanced forest inventories, area-based vs. individual tree-based lidar inventories, best practices for field sampling for lidar inventories, whether lidar can remotely sense age and much more.