Forests support more than 11 million jobs and contribute more than $77 billion to the U.S. economy. They also provide flood control, carbon sequestration, nutrient management, and recreational opportunities.
Large-scale automated inventory at the individual tree level is critical for natural resource management decision making to maximize these benefits. Conventional inventory has relied on periodic, sparse, manual biometric tree measurements. In a discussion facilitated by Indiana University's Kimberly Novick, Songlin Fei, director of Purdue University's Digital Forestry Initiative, will share a suite of tools that can provide automated and scalable solutions for large-scale natural forest inventory at individual tree level for large-scale estimation of wood volume, biomass and carbon storage. He will showcase an automated large-scale carbon/biomass inventory at the individual tree level by taking advantage of deep learning models and Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems, which can localize and measure tens of thousands of trees in a few hours.
This is a hybrid event scheduled for Thursday, October 9 at 1:20pm CT. Attendees are invited to join us in-person in the Graduate Center 1st Floor Commons of the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington. Light refreshments will be provided. The seminar will also be livestreamed via Zoom – register here to receive details.
Songlin Fei
Songlin Fei, Chair of Remote Sensing and Director of the Institute for Digital Forestry, is a quantitative ecologist specializing in forest ecology, invasion ecology, and geospatial analytics and joined the Purdue faculty in 2011. He received his PhD from Penn State University.
Dr. Fei’s forest ecology work includes impacts of climate change on forest dynamic and biodiversity-ecosystem function. In their 2017 Science Advances paper, for the first time, they provided empirical evidences of the divergent responses of deciduous and evergreen trees in response to climate change. It was highlighted by Nature and was the focus of stories of hundreds of international (e.g., German Public Radio, UK Daily Mail, China Xinhua News) and national (e.g., NPR Living on Earth, The Atlantic, The Associated Press) media. His research was ranked #59 in the top 100 science stories of 2017 by Discover magazine. Dr. Fei’s invasion ecology work has been well supported by NSF and well recognized by public media. For example, his 2019 PNAS paper on invasive pests was highlighted by Science, NBC News, and many other media. In 2018, Dr. Fei was invited to the Capitol Hill to showcase his research during the Ag Research Congressional Exhibition and Reception.
Dr. Fei is also leading the integrated digital forestry initiative, which aims to revolutionize forestry from labor intensive, manual methods to an effective, precise, digital system by testing and adopting existing digital tools and by developing new tools, algorithms, and platforms for precision forest management and for public health improvement and mitigation.
This event is part of the Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center’s Innovation in Adaptation speaker series and Indiana University’s O'Neill Environmental Science Speaker Series.