Grant: Engage Grants Program

Lizzie Bay Logging Ltd. is a logging and road building company located in Pemberton, B.C. It was establishedin 1984 by Norm Leblanc and currently employs between 50 and 80 people that work in collaboration with theFirst Nations Forestry Services Company Tsetspa7 Forestry Ltd. to properly manage their forestry resources. InNovember of 2015 they paid ~$50000 for the acquisition of LIDAR data on a section of forest within theirtimber rights. While this data was very informative and promises to improve their forestry managementpractices and reduce the amount of man hours spent walking the forest assessing timber value, it comes with asignificant price tag. To reduce this cost and to improve on their forestry management practices, Lizzie BayLogging Ltd. is interested in using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) instead of or in conjunction with planebased LIDAR. With the field of UAV based analysis rapidly expanding through the development of smallerand more powerful sensors that can be attached to cheaper and yet more advanced UAVs, a useful applicationwithin the forestry sector seems inevitable. However research with UAVs in this sector is extremely limited ingeneral and non-existent in the dense and mountainous regions of B.C. Through a partnership with researchersat Thompson Rivers University, forestry professionals at Lizzie Bay Logging Ltd. want to test UAVs as analternative method of surveying a section of forest to acquire timber data prior to sending people into the foreston foot. This partnership will assess the ability of UAVs equipped with high resolution cameras to mapsections of forest and then use the data in combination with advance mapping software to generate 2Dorthomosaic's and 3D models. The acquired maps will then be compared to the recently acquired LIDAR datato assess their accuracy and usefulness. The knowledge gained from this research will be transferred, not onlyto Lizzie Bay Logging Ltd, but also to the B.C. forestry community in general.