Staff News
Martin is visiting UC Berkeley and NCAR (Boulder, CO) again this year as part of a second 6 months sabbatical
2023 News
June
Research
Martin participated in the RAMI workshop in Varese, Italy
May
Research
The Digital forest lab was awarded the Nature x Carbon Tech Challenge prize
Martin participated in the 1st Strucnet workshop in Potsdam Germany
January
Staff News
Martin is visiting UC Berkeley and NCAR (Boulder, CO) as part of a 6 months sabbatical
2022 News
January
Staff News
Julie Vigouroux has joined the DFL lab as PhD student. Julie will work on characterizing tree degradation from insect infestation in northern Quebec using remote sensing
2021 News
September
Staff News
Xichun Zhou and Ny Tolotra have joined the DFL lab as PhD students. Xichun will work on the success and impact of reforestation efforts in Canada, and Ny will work on the use of lidar and hyperspectral data to characterize biodiversity in canadian forests
Van Tho Nguyen joined the DFL as a postdoc. Van Tho will be involved in the retrieval of LAI from terrestrial lidar scans in conifer forests, in algorithm development for estimating forest biomass from terrestrial lidar, and in the development of virtual forest environments derived from lidar.
Uziel Hernandez joined the lab as a MSc student in the Medecine Faculty, Uziel is working on assessing the effect of our virtual forest on people with Alzheimer's disease, together with Cyril Schneider from the readaptation department
July
Research
New publication : Béland, M. & Baldocchi, D. (2021) Vertical structure heterogeneity in broadleaf forests: Effects on light interception and canopy photosynthesis. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 307, 108525.
January
Research
New publication on mapping leaf area in dense broadleaf forests: Béland, M. & Kobayashi, H. (2021). Mapping forest leaf area density from multiview terrestrial lidar. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/2041-210X.13550
2020 News
September
Staff News
Omid Reisi Gahrouei has joined the lab as a PhD student and will study the combined use of airborne lidar and hyperspectral imagery to map tree species in forests
Olivier Matte has obtained his MSc diploma, congratulations Olivier!
Research
New publication on branch level clumping: Béland, M. & Baldocchi, D. (2020) Is foliage clumping an outcome of resource limitations within forests? Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 295, 108185.
January
Staff News
Miguel Alejandro Reyes Consuelo and Amin Shaker have started their Masters program with the lab and will work on our project to create a virtual forest to reduce anxiety in patients with Alzheimer's disease
2019 News
December
Research
Martin presented "Is foliage clumping an outcome of resource limitations within forests?" at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco, and visited Dennis Baldocchi at UC Berkley's Biomet lab
November
Research
Martin presented "Reproduire le monde réel en réalité virtuelle: le rôle du lidar" on the potential for terrestrial lidar to generate complex virtual reality environments at the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en réadaptation et intégration sociale (CIRRIS) in Quebec City
October
Research
Martin presented latests results from TLS data processing at the Silvilaser 2019 conference in Iguazu, Brazil: "On separating wood from leaves, accounting for leaf angle distribution, and occlusion effects in terrestrial lidar scans of dense forests", co-authored with Jean-Francois Tremblay
September
Research
Martin participated in the UAS tech demo event at the UAS center of excelence in Alma, Quebec, where the latest drone technologies were presented
August
Publications
New publication on the use of lidar in forest ecosystem research:
Beland, M., Parker, G., Sparrow, B., Harding, D., Chasmer, L., Phinn, S., Antonarakis, A., & Strahler, A. (2019) On promoting the use of lidar systems in forest ecosystem research. Forest Ecology and Management, 450, 117484
May
Staff News
Tristan Maurin and Alexis St-Amand joined the lab for the summer to work on our Asia deforestation monitoring project
April
Research
The lab received funding from the New Frontiers in Research Fund for creating a virtual reality experience of forest environments adapted for patients with Alzheimer's desease (2018 Competition Awards)
March
Staff News
Vivien Scholkopf is joining the lab for an internship. Vivien will be working on the estimation of forest biomass from airborne lidar
Research
Martin visited the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) in São José dos Campos, Brasil
February
Publications
New publication on the automated deforestation detection system in Asia:
Pauline Perbet, Michelle Fortin, Anouk Ville & Martin Béland (2019) Near real-time deforestation detection in Malaysia and Indonesia using change vector analysis with three sensors. International Journal of Remote Sensing.
2018 News
October
Publications
New publication on an algorithm to coregister terrestrial lidar scans using trees as reference target:
Tremblay, J.-F. & Béland, M. (2018) Towards operational marker-free registration of terrestrial lidar data in forests. ISPRS JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAMMETRY AND REMOTE SENSING, 146, 430-435.
September
Staff News
Tristan Gingras-Hill has joined the digital forest lab as a research associate. Tristan will be working on the use of airborne lidar in forestry operations planning and wood suply predictability
August
Research
Martin completed a ground lidar survey at the Acadia Research Forest, New Brunswick. This project is a collaboration with the Canadian Wood Fibre Centre and focuses on the use of QSM modeling to estimate tree level biomass
Staff News
Pauline gave birth to Marilou, congratulations to mom and welcome Marilou!
July
Research
Martin and Clement completed a ground lidar survey at the Morgan Monroe Forest, Indiana
May
Research
Martin completed a ground lidar survey at the Pasoh research forest, Malaysia
Martin visited the island of Sumatra to document recent deforestation events near the Bukit Tigapuluh National Park
April
Staff News
Jean-Romain Roussel successfully defended his PhD thesis, congratulations JR!
Meetings
Martin presented at the 9th International Conference and Exhibition on Geospatial & Remote Sensing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia : "a deforestation alert system based on Google Earth Engine"
February
Publications
New paper in press: Jean-Romain Roussel, Martin Béland, John Caspersen, Alexis Achim. A mathematical framework to describe the effect of beam incidence angle on metrics derived from airborne LiDAR: The case of forest canopies approaching turbid medium behaviour. Remote Sensing of Environment
January
Staff News
Clément Joubert joined the digital forest lab as a PhD student. Clément is working on modeling light interception in deciduous forests from terrestrial lidar measurements.
Olivier Matte joined the digital forest lab as a MSc student. Olivier will be working with the Google Earth Engine (GEE) team on the detection of deforestation in Asia
2017 News
October
Research
Martin gave an invited talk to the terrestrial ecology group (Department of Biology) at Sherbrooke University on the use of terrestrial lidar in upscaling fluxes from leaf to canopy level
September
Staff News
Jean-François Tremblay has started his M.Sc. studies, he will be working on the use of high density point clouds in forestry operations
August
Research
Two field campaigns were carried out this month. The first at Harvard Forest, a joint activity with the TLS RCN initiative (http://tlsrcn.bu.edu) which aimed at comparing TLS-based estimates of wood volume and leaf area against extensive destructive sampling. The second campaign at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, MD. At both locations a 50x50m2 plot was scanned on a 5m spaced grid, producing about 4 billion points per plot. Lots of processing to come..
July
Research
The Riegl VZ-400 TLS instrument was received and thoroughly tested in the field in preparation for two upcoming field campaigns
June
Meetings
Martin presented at the EO summit in Montreal: "On the effects of scan density and incident angle in airborne lidar data over forests"
Research
J-R Roussel published a R package for processing airborne lidar data : lidR: Airborne LiDAR Data Manipulation and Visualization for Forestry Applications
May
Publications
J-R Roussel et al published a paper on the effect of point density on tree height estimation from airborne lidar in the Journal RSE : Removing bias from LiDAR-based estimates of canopy height: Accounting for the effects of pulse density and footprint size
Staff News
Pauline Perbet has joined the digital forest lab as a MSc student. Pauline will be working with the Google Earth Engine (GEE) team on the detection of deforestation in Asia
Anouk Ville has also joined our lab for an internship with the GEE team, she is with us until September
April
Meetings
Martin gave an invited talk at the Institut de Recherche en Biologie Végétale of the Université de Montreal. The presentation stream is found here
February
Meetings
Martin participated in the Royal Society Theo Murphy International Meeting: "The terrestrial laser scanning revolution in forest ecology" in Chicheley, UK. He presented a poster by Jean-François Tremblay on preliminary results from his target less registration algorithm.
Martin presented ongoing work at the Digital Forest Lab during the RCN TLS group meeting at University College London
January
Staff News
Moritz Bruggisser has joined the digital forest lab as a PhD student. He recently graduated from the University of Zurich. He will be working on estimating leaf area density from terrestrial lidar in conifer forests, and on the simulation of airborne and spaceflight lidar measurements from TLS-based structure descriptions
Research
Funding from the John R. Evans Leaders Fund program of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation has been approved to provide the digital forest lab with a Riegl VZ-400 terrestrial laser scanner. Field work is scheduled to start in summer 2017!
2016 News
December
Meetings
Martin co-organized a workshop on the use of TLS in ecology "Terrestrial Laser Scanning for Ecology – New field technology to help measure and monitor vegetation structure" held during the Ecological Society of Australia annual meeting in Freemantle, Western Australia, co-sponsored by Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN)
Martin visited the Biomet lab at UC Berkeley
Martin co-convened a session on deriving and using forest structure information during the AGu Fall Meeting in San Francisco: "Forest Structure from Lidar: Getting and Using Structure to Monitor and Model Changes in Forest Ecosystem Functions and Services"
November
Meetings
Jean-Francois Tremblay presented his target-less TLS point cloud registration algorithm "Un algorithme pour l’alignement sans cible de scans LiDAR terrestre en forêt" at the TLS Workshop in Sherbrooke, Quebec: 6ième édition de l’atelier T-Lidar pour la communauté francophone Utilisation de nuage de points à haute densité pour l’écologie forestière
October
Publications
"Removing bias from LiDAR-based estimates of canopy height: accounting for the effects of pulse density and footprint size" Jean-Romain Roussel, John Casperson, Martin Beland, Alexis Achim; submitted to Remote Sensing of Environment
Meetings
All presentations from the May 2016 Workshop on the use of lidar in forests are available online in French and English at http://atelierlidar.ffgg.ulaval.ca/horaire/