Those of us who live our lives waiting for ArcGIS to manipulate the data we’ve input spend a lot of time marveling at the surprisingly slow computing power we seem to be up against – taking massively for granted the volume of data that makes up the data layers we have usually acquired for free. Even so, we are often using the best available data, which is not necessarily data which best informs the work we wish to conduct. Dr. Wulder’s world is an insight to the true wealth of work and quality that goes into new information sets and the capacity of landsat data to capture processes at a scale heretofore unimaginable.

Dr. Wulder took a subject involving a lot of technicality – both from the information science side as well as forestry – and made it highly accessible to the uninitiated. His use of visuals in his presentation was very helpful as they represented the processes the static data encapsulates. He also defined concepts, such as ‘facilitated recovery’ and ‘natural recovery’ succinctly and within the natural flow of the presentation.

As lidar is better than landsat for predicting treeline migration driven by climate change, a concession made by Dr. Wulder, this research is not directly applicable to my own research, but the wall-to-wall national process data his work provides is absolutely useful to understanding the recovery capacity of harvested versus burned landscapes. This information is useful to conservation planners as they consider new protected areas, as well as future managers of those areas. I found it especially interesting that harvested areas return more readily (faster recovery to pre-disturbance conditions) than burned areas because harvesting occurs in healthy forests whereas wildfire doesn’t discriminate—something that may well be considered before considering previous harvest a point against an area’s conservation value.

The previous evening, Dr. Wulder gave a different lecture, and I tuned in via the livestream. This made me notice that he did not repeat the questions asked, and I therefore did not hear them, obscuring the context of his otherwise thorough responses.