Grant: Engage Plus Grants Program

Currently FRMG (First Resource Management Group Inc.) allocates harvest blocks in Crown forests tocompanies that harvest or consume timber. Each consuming mill has specific requirements as to the type oftimber they require. The most important requirement is for hardwood versus softwood. Mills also expect toreceive certain amount of timber volume to process. The existing Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources(OMNR) Forest Resource Inventory (FRI) is very inaccurate with an estimated error of 64% in the speciescomposition on harvest blocks, which also translate in uncertainty of harvested volumes. This inaccuracy isextremely costly. It can result in harvesters or consuming mills having to purchase timber from unallocatedharvest blocks that may be a great distance away. The level of accuracy could be increased by new remotesensing approaches. Orthoimages and digital surface models (DSM) derived from aerial photo are now widelyavailable but have not yet been exploited to their full potential as more advanced methods are needed to extracttheir full information contents. Significant progress has been made in the first phase of this project in usingthese DSMs. A new method for creating canopy height models (detailed maps of forest height) from theseDSMs have been developed and applied to not only characterize heights but also timber volumes. Mapping theproportions of hardwood and softwood trees from aerial images has however proven more difficult thananticipated. Accuracy is variable depending on the acquisition conditions of these images. For this reason, inthis second phase, we will be using a different type of multispectral imagery for achieving our goals. Moreover,obtaining reliable validation data for the timber volumes predicted by remote sensing is quite challengingbecause the volume of a tree is difficult to measure. Without trustable validation data, it is difficult to ascertainthat the remote sensing estimates of volume are accurate. For this reason, an intensive field campaign will becarried out. FRMG inc. will benefit from the advances brought about by this project by reducing harvest costsfor their clients and profiting from a new competitive advantage.