Another week! Dr. Michael Wulder’s presented his amazing project, entitled “Satellite Data Study to Quantify Return of Forests for Wildfire and Harvest”. The project scale of Michael and his party has been done on a big chunk of Canadian Landmass was very impressive because the amount of data they handled, the result they delivered were enormous. Spatial resolution of individual infrared band of Landsat Satellite imagery is 30meter, and minimum of three bands are required to be composited. Michael and his party also used multi-temporal series of data starting from 1985 to 2011 for BAP (best available pixel) composite process which added more time to process from selection of multi temporal imagery within a year, and finally made it seamless mosaic for the whole Canada. Even though he used most recent technologies and computer resources, Rule-based processing for individual band for one scene covered approximately (180 x 180 Km) will take lots of time. Can you imagine the job for entire Canada? The deliverable of composite imagery will be very useful to utilize as base image for digital mapping for regional application, so, I might find ways to integrate into iMapBC or ArcGIS as a web mapping service.

Among his presentation, forest recovery monitoring part by using the images and airborne LiDAR data intrigued me on how his method can effectively used for the industry. The 30m spatial resolution of Landsat imagery can be good enough to measure harvesting block and certain size of wildfire disturbances, but it will not be good enough to measure crown width. Even if he will use Airborne LiDAR to measure the crown width and the stand, would that be economically sustainable to have multi-temporal LiDAR data and to process those for long term?

His presentation was not directly relating to my research. However, some methodologies he applied for Landsat image processing some how might have been similar to my third method of Thermal Infrared Imagery processing techniques. If necessary, I might have followed up with him for details. Michael answered the questions thoroughly within his knowledge. If I have an opportunity to ask, I would like to know more about accuracy assessment methodology for his classification. I enjoyed the presentation as I always need to know more to my knowledge be golden.