The past 5 years have seen a revolution in both the availability and processing of remote sensing data to inform on environmental impacts. These advances are due to innovations in remote sensing platforms and technology such as drones and LIDAR, as well as processing advances such as digital photogrammetry. In this talk, Nicholas Coops and PhD candidate Rik Nuijten will discuss the background to these advances, and some examples of how they can be used to monitor forest regeneration, restoration, biodiversity assessment and trends and changes in environmental conditions.

By attending this webinar, you will learn about:

• How imagery acquired from drones can be processed to provide analysis-ready data
• Recent advancements in camera and processing techniques enabling (near) plant-level monitoring
• The availability of new satellite-based remote sensing datasets, like Cubesat
• The power of data fusion to exploit key benefits of different datasets and sensors.

A panel discussion with other remote sensing experts/professionals will follow.

Featured speakers:

Nicholas Coops is a professor at the University of British Columbia and a Canada Research Chair in remote sensing. He is the head of the Integrated Remote Sensing Studio (IRSS) within the Faculty of Forestry at UBC, a research lab investigating and demonstrating applications of remote sensing data to environmental and forest production issues with 30 PhD, MSc and Postdocs. He has published over 500 peer-reviewed journal papers and was the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing for a decade. In 2020 Nicholas was a joint winner of the Marcus Wallenberg Prize for his research into satellite analysis and numerical modelling of tree and forest growth.

Rik Nuijten is a PhD candidate working with Nicholas Coops, investigating the potential of drone-based imaging for applications relevant to monitoring ecological restoration projects. He is demonstrating the operationality of current technology. Ongoing research is focused on developing tools and techniques for mapping vegetation structure, community composition, plant richness, as well as invading species. Future work will demonstrate how mapping products of ecosites can be compared, enabling the use of ecological references based on drone data. Rik obtained a degree in human geography (B.Sc.) and geographical information management (M.Sc.) at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Panel Discussion:

We are pleased to welcome additional remote sensing experts to join our featured speakers in a panel discussion to further explore advances and applications of remote sensing for monitoring environmental impacts.

Rebecca Edwards is a Remote Sensing Analyst with Ducks Unlimited Canada’s (DUC) National Boreal Program. Rebecca has worked with DUC for the past five years working on DUC’s northern wetland inventories and geospatial communication. She has over eight years of experience in the field of geomatics from earning her B.Sc. in Geoscience at Vancouver Island University, British Columbia and an M.Sc. in geography specializing in remote sensing at Queens University, Ontario. Her master’s thesis focused on analyzing 30-year vegetation change in Iqaluit Nunavut.

Joanne White (PhD) is a Research Scientist with the Canadian Forest Service specializing in remote sensing applications for forest inventory and monitoring. She received her Doctor of Science degree from the Department of Forest Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Finland and has published more than 188 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. White is recognized as a global expert in the application of 3D data for forest inventory, leading the development of two best practice guides and contributing to national lidar acquisition standards. Dr. White is also an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia and serves on the Editorial Boards of Remote Sensing of Environment and Current Forestry Reports. For the past three years, she has been named on the global list of Highly Cited Researchers in both the cross-field and geosciences categories.

Darren Pouliot is a Research Scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, National Wildlife Research Centre in the Landscape Science and Technology Division specializing in geospatial/remote sensing analysis. He leads research on the development of computing infrastructure for geospatial big data processing and machine learning/AI for landscape characterization and change monitoring in support of wildlife applications. His research covers a diverse range of ecosystems at local to continental scales including arctic, grasslands/agriculture, wetlands, and forests contributing to species at risk, biodiversity, climate change, and cumulative effects information needs. He has more than 20 years of experience and numerous publications on these topics.

Note* This presentation will be in English.