Issue link: https://geospatial.trimble.com/en/resources/i/1397665
With nearly 50 percent of Quebec—76 million hectares (57 million acres)—covered in forest, forest management in this Canadian province is serious business. A key supporter of this business is the Centre D'enseignement et de Recherche en Foresterie de Sainte-Foy (CERFO), which develops applied research tools for the industry. Recent research using very high-resolution satellite imagery, lidar data, and object-based image analysis (OBIA) software studied the ability to automatically identify individual Broadleaf and Conifer trees in dense, complex forests. The successful test may plant a new path for efficient, targeted tree management. overview Location QUEBEC, CANADA TRANSFORMING THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS TRANSFORMING THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS Rich with forest landscapes that cover an area twice the size of Sweden, Quebec's forest industry is valued at around $10 billion CAD ($7.8 billion US)—the second largest amount of any Canadian province—and employs about 65,000 people. Although forest managers have used geospatial tools to assess their properties, classifying forest land is often done by combining photogrammetry and drawing features by hand. "Standard practice is to manually delineate forest species at the stand level, which is time consuming and subject to misinterpretation," said Mathieu Varin, head of CERFO's remote sensing laboratory. "Automizing that process and scaling it down to classify individual trees would allow managers to individually oversee specific tree species and develop targeted silviculture and harvesting plans." Varin and colleagues not only wanted to test an automated classification method on Broadleaf and Conifer species— tree types that are challenging to delineate—they wanted to test it in a complex forest. They chose three areas of interest (AOI) totaling 26 square kilometers in the Kenauk Nature preserve, one of the largest private nature reserves in North America. Located in the southwest of Quebec, the property encompasses 26,000 ha (65,000 ac) of heterogenous forest.