Creating the forest inventory – how academic research is driving vegetation management
By Tim Hustwayte - Senior Client Manager
For the last year NM Group has been working with academics at Durham University to devise ways of splitting forest canopy LiDAR data into meaningful, more manageable units. This information is to enable utility foresters and asset managers improve the extraction of important information from vegetation and forest areas within the ROW. In effect creating an asset register of trees and a forest inventory.
Through the analysis of these canopy objects, the complex 3-dimensional growth patterns and interactions between adjacent canopies can be modeled. This allows NM Group to provide more useful and detailed information, such as health and risk, for direct use within client’s vegetation management systems.
The aim of the Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Durham University is to ensure cutting edge academic research underpins NM Group’s utility vegetation management products. The combination of these two partners is driving innovation in the industry and academic progress in the field of LiDAR for vegetation analysis.
More information on vegetation analytics can be found here.