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It is all changing

Started by Texas Ranger, July 20, 2017, 12:39:58 PM

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Texas Ranger

Forestry, that is.  I received a copy of a forestry catalog and thumbed through it.  The modern equipment for a forester is really telling me how old I am.  They offered drones, which would be invaluable for hunting bug spots, counting trees, looking for disease, spotting on a fire.  Electronics that do all that brain numbing compiling of data, and then correlating it.  Computer programs that are a whiz-bang for doing the same that used to take days in the office, now in hours.

To old to change, but the young forester has more available than the entire forest service back in my day.
The Ranger, home of Texas Forestry

Riwaka

Droneseed - how far has the drone seeding technology progressed?

https://youtu.be/EkNdrTZ7CG4

whitepine2


timberking

Apparently all the technology has eliminated the need for many foresters if you look at staffing levels. 

clearcut

As the costs come down and technology improves, a combination of Aerial LIDAR and Terrestrial Laser Imaging might make traditional forest inventory obsolete. The aerial imagery can capture integrated stand and forest characteristics such as stand boundaries, topography, hydrology, and such. Terrestrial laser imaging can capture individual tree characteristics such as species, diameter (at every point along the bole), height, and characteristics that are impossible to capture from traditional inventories such as the number and position of branches. GPS ties these measurements together. A detailed prescription can be generated and sent to the machine doing the harvesting to select individual trees.

I suspect that in the near future, someone will superglue these sensors to a drone and you could "cruise" a forest in a few minutes.

While boots on the ground will never be replaced entirely, it is likely that those boots will spend a lot less time on a particular piece of ground.

Open the Pod Bay doors, HAL.

Carbon sequestered upon request.

Wudman

Look at the "age" of the posters above and you see one of the reasons that technology must move forward.  We are facing a serious shortage of young foresters coming out of school.  About half of our field staff is set to retire in the next 5 years and we don't know where the replacements will come from.  We don't have too much trouble finding analyst, GIS Specialist, and folks that work behind a computer, but there aren't too many out there that will run a cruise line across a Carolina Bay or hack through gallberry and titi.  I spend 70% of my time in an office now and cover a geographic area that was once covered by 8 people.  Thirty years ago, 95% of my time was spent in the field or on the road.  Technology is good.  We can spend those man hours in the places that returns the "most bang for the buck"......and LIDAR is looking pretty good to my aging bones.

Wudman   
"You may tear down statues and burn buildings but you can't kill the spirit of patriots and when they've had enough this madness will end."
Charlie Daniels
July 4, 2020 (2 days before his death)

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