Webinar held Wednesday 11th March, 2015. Presented by: Christine Stone, DPI NSW.
Dr Christine Stone is the Leader of the Forest Science Unit within the NSW Department of Primary Industries and is a Principal Research Scientist. She has been involved in commercial forestry related research for more than 25 years, working in the areas of forest health, biosecurity, surveillance and more recently in the application of remote sensing technologies for resource assessment.
Dr Stone was responsible for managing the national FWPA project PNC305-1213 “Deployment and integration of cost-effective, high spatial resolution, remotely sensed data for the Australian forestry industry”.
Six Australian softwood companies collaborated in this project, gaining knowledge and access to LiDAR data acquisition and processing solution shown to be capable of producing information outcomes superior to existing resource assessments. An operational prototype based on LiDAR nearest neighbour plot imputation was presented and made available to the participating companies. It is modular in structure and can be integrated into existing systems. Financial analysis showed that that for surveys that take place every two to three years, LiDAR based forest inventory is clearly cost-effective.
She is now managing another remote sensing FWPA that will extend and expand the findings of the initial project to include eucalypt plantation and native forest growers as well as the softwood plantation growers across a broader range of remote sensing systems and platforms.
