Christine Stone

New technology to remotely assess individual trees
While foresters don’t necessarily have to abandon their diameter tapes and vertex hypsometers, there is no denying that rapidly-evolving remote sensing technologies are revolutionising forest management practices. Field-based inventory methods and sampling designs can estimate variables such as height, volume, basal area and number of trees fairly accurately, if enough sampling plots are included, but ...Read More

Optimising remotely acquired, dense point cloud data for plantation inventory
This project was designed to harness the rapid technological advances being made in the capture and processing of dense point cloud data as a tool for forest estate management. It involved multi-discipline collaboration with commercial plantation growers, lead forest industry service providers and robotics scientists to ensure the delivery of efficient, resource assessment products.  This ...Read More

Remote sensing advances to cut costs, increase speed and usher in virtual reality
New technological tools harnessing the power of remote sensing to make it quicker, easier and cheaper to measure forest inventory have been unveiled at an industry briefing – and in future they could potentially enable a virtual “walk through the forest”. Researchers have briefed estate managers and forest planners on the results of a world-leading ...Read More

Operational deployment of LiDAR derived information into softwood resource systems
The project evaluated LiDAR based inventory solutions for softwood plantations in terms of information outcomes, technical feasibility and cost effectiveness.  The project demonstrated that imputation models are able to predict many commercially valuable parameters, appear robust and produce predictions that make sense. Since models are central in a model-based inventory system this provides confidence that ...Read More