Grant: CCI Applied Research and Development Grants

The "Newington Creek restoration via remote geospatial mapping in Darkwoods Conservation Area" project is a collaboration between Selkirk Innovates and the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC). NCC owns and manages Darkwoods as one of the largest private conservation lands in Canada, protecting 63,000 hectares of forest & wildlife habitat. Managers are concerned that high densities have created conditions increasing the likelihood of moisture stress, insect, and disease infestation. Applying Selkirk College's 20 years of expertise in drone-enabled geomatics for forestry applications, the project will leverage emerging sensor technology and artificial intelligence to develop methods to produce remotely-sensed forest inventories of equivalent or better accuracy than traditional ground-based forestry methods. Traditional methods use plot data to extrapolate forest metrics across large areas. Remote methods that accurately characterize the size (i.e. height, diameter), health status (i.e. damage codes, disease codes), and species of individual trees would not rely on extrapolation and therefore produce more accurate inventories. The current literature demonstrates the applicability of these techniques generally, but fails to deliver practical tools that forest managers can use at scale to inform timely, targeted actions to steward forest resources more effectively. The project initially seeks to develop a remote (i.e. drone-enabled) forest inventory methodology at the stand level in the Newington Creek Drainage in Southeastern BC. Researchers then propose to apply this methodology in different areas in Darkwoods Conservation Area, potentially at larger scales, perhaps with a focus on beetle infestations or other stressors of concern. The research may ultimately prove a methodology that improves overall knowledge and understanding of forest conditions by identifying new specific spectral bands/indices that are commercially available at larger and coarser scales (i.e. satellite products, fixed-wing survey). Forest managers and other stakeholder groups would be able to purchase these products and apply our techniques over broader landscapes. This would provide forest managers with very good information for planning of operations, both in a commercial forestry context, and for conservation, wildfire fuel reduction, and mitigation of other risks.