The Digital Forester

Brendan Moore is a Project Manager at The Lyme Timber Company, a private timberland investment organization founded in 1976, and joins us from Vermont, USA. He shares with us why folks with the most challenging forests are the ones adopting technology the fastest and how that translates into Lyme acquiring over 700,000 acres of lidar data and adoption of earth observation for change detection. Com...

Rolf Schmitz is the co-CEO and co-founder of CollectiveCrunch and while normally based out of Germany, joins us from Espoo, Finland. In his words, modelling nature is incredibly complex but also fun and beautiful. CollectiveCrunch originated from the idea that it could make a difference by combining climate and geo data with state-of-the-art analytics to develop new insights. In this conversation,...

Alex Bilyk is the Forest Inventory Innovation Manager at Silvacom and joins us from the company’s Thunder Bay office. In this podcast, Alex talks about the state of lidar forest inventory across Canada, how opening access to satellite data archives, such as Landsat, has allowed us to go back in time and ask some interesting questions, and importance of open data in driving innovation. Other topics...

Brandon Craft is a Technical Services Forester at Forest Resource Consultants (FRC) and joins us from Macon, GA. Immediately after completing his master’s degree in forestry from Auburn University, Brandon launched his own forest service provider firm and built it up to a seven-person firm before deciding to join FRC to help with its digital transformation. Come listen to Brandon’s thoughts on how...

Bruce MacArthur is the CEO of Tesera Systems and joins us from the foothills in between Cochrane and Calgary, Alberta. He started his career in forestry by working in sawmills at the age of 14 years old, which in turn led to the pursuit of a forestry degree at UBC. With staff in BC, Alberta, Nova Scotia and Thailand, Tesera is a remote first company and has been in business for over 24 years with...

Dr. Cassidy Rankine is the Western Canadian Account Executive at Planet and joins us from Vernon, BC to share his thoughts on the state of earth observation (EO) in forestry. With a Ph. D. in remote sensing and forest ecology and succession from the University of Alberta, Dr. Rankine was also the co-founder of a drone startup company prior to joining Planet. Come listen to hear Dr. Rankine’s thoug...

Scot McQueen, Senior Technology Officer at the Forest Stewardship Council, joins us from Olympia, Washington to share with us how he is leveraging technology to drive positive and impactful change in forestry around the world. What does Esri, Planet, Tableau, DocuSign, Amazon Web Services, and Google all have in common? They are part of the FSC Technology Consortium and working together to solve s...

Adam Dick is a Science Advisor at the Canadian Wood Fibre Centre, Canadian Forest Service and joins us from Fredericton. Adam was one of the champions that brought lidar enhanced forest inventory (EFI) to New Brunswick, which has resulted in the province having wall-to-wall lidar coverage and EFI predictions. From academia, to industry, to provincial and federal government roles, Adam shares his t...

Albrecht von Ruffer, CEO of SKYLAB, joins us from Hamburg, Germany. As a biologist by training and an entrepreneur with a successful exit already, Albrecht founded SKYLAB in 2017 to leverage advances that had been made in drone technology and photogrammetry software to solve day-to-day forestry problems. Since then, SKYLAB has developed a web-based SaaS platform powered by AI that can use drone- o...

Dr. Guoliang Liu, President of aiTree Ltd., calls in from China while on a business trip to talk about his journey over the last 30 years bringing his vision of a digital forest to reality. aiTree’s Forest Simulation Optimization System (FSOS) technology uses artificial intelligence, big data and cloud computing technologies to solve the complicated demand and supply problems. Come listen to learn...

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 mid...

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 retirem...

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 UA...

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...

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 App...

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...

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 u...

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...

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 fundi...

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 im...

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...

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 an...

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.