America’s largest landowner is using AI to digitise the forest

Weyerhaeuser is pursuing autonomous logging equipment and hopes to double its profits by 2030 independent of any increase in lumber prices.

Autonomous skidders that drag felled trees around logging sites. A database detailing each tree in the forest. A screen that shows loggers which trees to cut and which to leave standing to maximize financial returns decades down the line.

Weyerhaeuser, the country’s top logger and one of its oldest companies, is betting artificial intelligence can deliver these and other big changes to American forestry, which has come a long way from oxen and axes. Many applications envisioned by Weyerhaeuser executives are unique to a company that manages timberlands in the U.S. and Canada that together cover an area roughly the size of Indiana.

“We’ve been growing forests for 125 years. We probably have as much information and data about how forests grow as any organization on the planet,” Chief Executive Devin Stockfish said in an interview. “The opportunity set here is really leveraging this new transformational technology to take all of that information and data and make everything we do better.”

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Source: MSN

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