Rohan Aurora introduced speaker Professor Nicholas Coops who is the department head of Forest Resources Management at UBC. His, and his team’s, overall focus is on understanding our province’s forests and how remote sensing technologies can be used to facilitate this.
Some of the accolades to Nicholas’ name are: Canada Research Chair in Remote Sensing, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada 2022, 2022 Canadian Institute of Forestry Scientific Award, Joint Winner. Marcus Wallenberg Prize 2020, Gold Medal – Canadian Remote Sensing Society 2020, and 2020 UBC Killam Research Prize.
Nicholas’ talk was very informative and engaging. It’s truly mind boggling what these remote technologies can tell us. There are 250 satellites that go over Vancouver daily. Some provide images in fine detail, some broader. Some are privately owned, with the majority owned by governments.
All the data is free to anyone who wants to use it. There are about 120M images daily available. It takes about 90 mins for a satellite to go around the world once. It takes 16 days for one satellite to take a complete set of images of the world. From space the best quality images can see if you’re having a picnic, just not what’s on your plate. These top quality images are owned by private companies and are available for a fee.
How do we use all this information? It’s used by Nicholas and his team to track changes in our forests. Where is there damage, what are the sources of the damage, e.g., fire, pine beetle, etc. Then they look over time how the forests recover and move back to a healthy state.
Fire is fundamentally important in the boreal forests and is a natural occurrence. There is usually a 100 year cycle of fires. In most cases of fire intervention is not required – there is no infrastructure being interrupted or people endangered. It’s best to allow nature to take its course.
Looking province to province it’s interesting to see the differences of what the forests are experiencing, from harvesting to pine beetle, and lots in between. The fear of climate change is that forests return to ‘normal’ after fires is different. Are there different species that were not prevalent before growing and taking over.
All resource reporting is satellite based. Forestry companies are responsible for the recovery of the forests they harvest. Though that’s a very small portion of our country. Given our vast country and the difficult terrain the best approach is to monitor and go in when a problem is identified. It is very tricky to manage.
The workhorse is Landsat. Landsat satellites have the optimal ground resolution and spectral bands to efficiently track land use and to document land change due to climate change, urbanization, drought, wildfire, biomass changes (carbon assessments), and a host of other natural and human-caused changes. Every day satellites shoot out lasers that give info about height of land and trees. A laser pulse travels at the speed of light, at a rate of 250,000 pulses per second. The information provided is incredibly accurate.
The extraordinary information collected allows one to see the height of individual trees, the structure of the trees, and the land cover. It is accurate within 20 cms. It’s actually better than live measuring from the ground. The only more accurate measurement is from cutting the tree down.
It is even possible to identify what types of trees and the health of the tree. It is possible, with this data, to count every single tree in BC. All sort of different information is gathered. There are projects around the world to build databases cataloguing all trees, types and all related info, around the globe.
Another benefit of these technologies is identifying the best trees to harvest seed stock from for reforestation that is used by forestry companies.
Drones are revolutionizing the way we collect data. “The flexibility of drones allows them to capture high-resolution images and video in real-time, even during the humid tropical climate. Artificial Intelligence-powered drones, along with drones that use LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) can monitor and inspect large areas with focused coverage that yields faster and precise results and data.” (source: Equinox Drones website, https://www.equinoxsdrones.com/how-drone-technology-is-becoming-essential-for-forestry/)
There is very interesting work is being done using this technology to study fish. The imagery allows for detailed mapping of streams throughout the landscape. It can be worked out what the slant of the stream is because the info is derived from a terrain model. You can also calculate the width of the streams. Therefore you can map with incredible accuracy which streams can have salmon and which cannot.
The info from the space technology is almost exactly the same as that derived from physical testing the terrain. It is unbelievable accuracy to allow an in depth understanding of what is happening, in near real time, to our environment.
BC is lagging behind other provinces in gathering data. One of the reasons for this is the incredibly diverse and difficult terrain in the province.
Nicholas concluded his informative and engaging presentation by saying that Canada has 20% of the world’s forests. In general, we can take heart in knowing we are looking after our forests well.
Ken’s award-winning experience in the hospitality and tourism industry spans almost 40 years. He joined the Vancouver Convention Centre (VCC) as General Manager in 2008, before being named Chief Operating Officer of B.C. Pavilion Corporation (PavCo) in 2013. Ken was appointed President and CEO of PavCo in February 2014.
