How Lidar’s changed workflows in the forest industry

Since the invention of lidar in the 1960s, its usage has continued to expand, with the last couple of decades in particular marking significant upticks in use cases. Today, it is still most associated with the automotive and surveying industries, with most manufacturers in the former category using the technology as part of its autonomous driving toolkit. Surveying, of course, was among the early adopters of the technology, using its capabilities to calculate terrain elevation more precisely and efficiently than they’d ever been able to previously.

As laser scanning technologies of all kinds, be it terrestrial, airborne, UAV, or mobile, become more democratized, new industries are able to test these tools and determine the value they can provide in these new sectors. Over the last decade or so, the forestry industry has become a prime example of this phenomenon, starting a new subsection of the industry often referred to as “digital forestry.”

Big news came down in this digital forestry space last month, specifically in North America, with the announcement that Barr GeoSpatial Solutions (BGS) had acquired Forsite Consultants. In their release of the news, BGS says that Forsite being part of their group will provide them “the resources and market access to allow the expansion of our technology product offerings across North America and around the world.”

Recently, Geo Week News spoke with Cam Brown, manager of resource management and technology with Forsite, and Mark Corrao, Chief Innovation Officer with Northwest Management, Inc. (also part of BGS), about the digital forestry space and what lidar has added to the overall industry.

Although Brown’s work is generally in Canada – though Forsite does work on projects in the United States as well – while Corrao’s is generally in the U.S., they unsurprisingly each work on similar types of projects and have similar tales of how lidar started to take hold of the industry. Corrao tells Geo Week News about key products used by his team, including ForestView – the complete package of software tools offered by Northwest Management that “takes a Lidar scan, field work, publicly available data, client historic data and produces valuable decision-support tools for multiple industries that work with natural landscapes.”

More broadly, what each of these industry veterans relay is a similar process as to how lidar has taken hold in other industries, including traditional ones like surveying. Essentially, they are using remote sensing to more efficiently and effectively complete projects that would have taken many man-hours and, as a result, much higher costs. Mostly using crewed aircraft, they are flying over relevant portions of forests and using lidar to collect point clouds for individual trees – as well as the terrain underneath them. From there, they are able to utilize machine learning capabilities developed by Forsite to predict the types of trees and other relevant attributes.

“You have a known height [measured from the point cloud], you predict the species, and based on the height and a bunch of metrics and the species, you predict the diameter of the tree at the base,” Brown explained to Geo Week News about this process. “From there, we use allometric equations to calculate everything else we need about that tree. You’ll need to predict species and diameter, and everything else flows after that, and you have an inventory of every single tree in your forest. We’re doing this across millions and millions of hectares.”

Corrao, believes this “Digital Inventory” – which he defines as “the act of taking this new technology that have increased resolution, robust field verification, and move the industry away from sampling grids that impute/extrapolate limited information to the “blank spaces” they don’t have any information on” – is only the beginning.

“It is the proverbial doorway to quantifying change, risk, value, and patterns/conditions at an accuracy and resolution we have never before been able to do without enormous time and cost expense. It’s like purchasing a Volkswagen bug and being delivered a Ferrari, a garage to put it in, and fuel for life.”

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Source: geoweeknews