HIGH PROFILE
Biorefinery Siting Tool (USA)
industry Esri sold into so we have a long history with the community. As Esri’s Forestry Manager, I act as the voice of the global forest sector – I’m the industry advocate that goes to the Esri development team and tells them what foresters want from their GIS products. Most of our engineers don’t know what foresters do with the technology, so I bring that information to them. I translate the requirements to help our developers build our products so that they continue to provide the best GIS solutions for the forest industry. My second function is to be
Esri’s forestry GIS expert. When our customers or distributors around the world want to know about forestry applications, best practices, and ideas for improving existing systems, I’m there to share this information. I just went to Canada to work with a few companies and help them identify opportunities for improving and enhancing their use of GIS technology. I shared ways other clients are using our products to
make their businesses run smoother and to get more value from their forests. In a few weeks I’ll be in Brazil working with a number of pulp and paper companies. The third thing I do is help build a community for forestry professionals who work with GIS. One of the challenges of forestry is that we’re typically spread out in remote areas. Not a lot of communication takes place between companies and organisations from a global
perspective. This is why I am excited about International Forest Industries magazine because it takes a global rather than regional perspective. So I’ve been working very hard on building a community of forestry GIS professionals and alongside some key customers and partners, we’ve set up the Esri Forestry Group, which has over 1,000 members. We plan and host events, the most important being the Esri Forestry GIS conference at our headquarters. We invite speakers and give people a
chance to share ideas. We also augment event opportunities by hosting online resources such as social media so that people can easily connect with one another.
IFI: What are your clients asking for at the moment? PE: From a technology perspective, lidar is one of the biggest areas of interest. Many of our customers are acquiring vast volumes of lidar data and once they have it, they want to do something with it. When it comes to lidar we have the ability to support on the ground operational activities. For example, you can use lidar data for road design in engineering projects. People are also interested in value-added solutions. For instance, a group in New Zealand has developed a cable logging application that uses high resolution terrains to plan out deflection lines and make sure towers are located in the right place. That’s taking GIS down to the people on the ground harvesting timber. Many organisations are also
Carbon Pool Modelling (Canada) courtesy of Remsoft 70 International Forest Industries | FEBRUARY/MARCH 2012
very interested in system-wide GIS infrastructure. This is commonly known as an enterprise GIS where you set up systems and allow your entire organisation to access data, maps and applications. Historically foresters had systems that were only accessible to highly technical people but weren’t really useful to executives and certainly not to non-technical field specialists. Our new products
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