Technologies for silviculture activities: understanding of the practicality of GIS and remote sensing, smartphone, and UAV Lidar

Abstract

This thesis explores the technologies apply in silviculture activities. Silvicultural activities are an essential process in forest management. To meet management objectives, the forester requires to collect any data, information on the site and do silviculture practices like thinning, tending, and harvesting. Back at the beginning of 20 century, manpower was the primary tool in doing silviculture activities. With the development of science and technology, more handy tools appeared, helping us do silviculture activities. The leading technologies that we use today are geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing. They can gather a large amount of information with a few operators. With GIS, we can update the site's information in a short period to monitor the site and change management strategy. A smartphone is also an excellent tool to improve site data collection. Smartphone has many valuable applications like a map, a global positioning system (GPS), and digital camera. It is a useful technology for the student with a limit budget. However, limit by its saved data and running speed, the smartphone is more suitable for small-scale forest management than large-scale forest management. More and more foresters use UAV LiDAR to get 3D information to get precise details of trees. The 5G era is coming. With the faster computer running speed, what will silviculture activities be like in the future? Just imagine a drone can do every silviculture practice on the site. People do not need to take a risk to do some dangerous silviculture practices. This thesis mainly discusses the technologies that apply in silviculture activities to analyze the pros and cons of those technologies.