"Fiber Inventory for Biomass Utilization" a project from CBRDI Columbia Basin Rural Development Institute partnered with the SGRC Selkirk Geospatial Research Centre – in this phase accessing wood-waste volume calculations with UAV!

This is a guest blog post by Raymond Neto as part of his Bachelor's of GIS.

Forestry is the foundation economy of 140 communities in British Columbia, and 40% of regional economies are dependent on forest products (Council of Forest Industries – 2016), contributing with $ 7 billion (3,4%) to the provincial GDP (Forestry Innovation Investment – 2017). The interior is responsible for 80% of the lumber production, 74% of the timber harvest volumes and for 50% of the pulp and paper production, and wood, object of this RDI project, is the largest biomass energy source today. This way, there’s an emerging opportunity to commercialize the forest residuals, but unfortunately, nowadays most of the provincial wood-waste is burned, increasing the emission to the greenhouse and the risk of wildfires.

Beyond other areas to forestry innovation, like GIS, Geo-Visualization or LIDAR, the SGRC has expertise in UAVs and is providing all the support to access volume calculations of wood-waste piles – one of the challenges to the local biomass commerce and only one of many other applications of drones to the forest industry! In this quick video, you can check a first UAV flight and the 3D DSM model to run the calculation on Correlator 3D.

Thanks Ian Dennis for the support!