Forests are often described as the ‘lungs of the Earth’, absorbing twice as much carbon as they emit, acting as carbon sinks (storing CO2 in their branches, roots and leaves). Carbon sinks are essential to climate mitigation and limiting further global temperature rises hence the importance of forest monitoring.
From an article by the University of Cambridge.
Dr Emily Lines, Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for Earth Observation, and her team have been monitoring forests across Europe to collect data from ground-based instruments such as Terrestrial Laser Scanning, drones and even traditional tape measures.
From this, the team hopes to directly monitor Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) with the help of AI. EBVs are a set of core variables that will collectively show the effect of anthropogenic change on biodiversity.
Lines and Owen are now using AI and drones to speed up this process to just a few minutes from hours and days. Owen has been building an AI model, using ‘deep learning’, to automatically classify data points into individual trees and break them down into 3D components such as wood and leaves. This will reveal how carbon is stored in each tree and where microhabitats are formed.
“It’s pretty straightforward to fly a lot of these smaller drones, they have a huge potential for being an important part of the conservation toolkit and monitoring toolkit – and AI is taking the manual labour bottleneck and accelerating it,” Lines said.
This is one of the several ground-breaking projects under a new Cambridge focus on AI for Climate and Nature, which has received seed funding from ai@cam, the University’s flagship AI mission.
For the complete article on forest monitoring CLICK HERE.
http://lidarnews.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ca4e23e0ae0178817d0fdf309&id=e6f5cb94f2″>here to stay informed of all of the 3D laser scanning, geomatics, UAS, autonomous vehicle, Lidar News and more. If you have an informative 3D video that you would like us to promote, please forward to editor@lidarnews.com and if you would like to join the Younger Geospatial Professional movement click here
