General Forestry Employment Opportunities

[Scooter]

Those of you who may have casually wondered what kind of full-time career possibilities exist in forestry should check out this page:

http://canadian-forests.com/job.html

For example, at the moment, there are job posting for everything from BCTS and MOF employees, to various types of positions at mills and logging companies, to things like seasonal survey and vegetation management at Spectrum, and a whole lot more.

[newforest]

dunno where else to post this, but have been thinking on something I heard in the woods this spring, from a recent Forestry graduate:

apparently drones will soon be used to carry LIDAR, and this will make it possible to cruise Timber without even putting boots-on-the-ground at all. so I wonder how that will impact Forestry jobs and how much higher that will ratchet up the hectares / Forester ratios

and I will smirk a little bit more the next time someone sends me a highly impractical tree-planting robot design...

[RPF]

dunno where else to post this, but have been thinking on something I heard in the woods this spring, from a recent Forestry graduate:

apparently drones will soon be used to carry LIDAR, and this will make it possible to cruise Timber without even putting boots-on-the-ground at all. so I wonder how that will impact Forestry jobs and how much higher that will ratchet up the hectares / Forester ratios

and I will smirk a little bit more the next time someone sends me a highly impractical tree-planting robot design...

Not to worry. Lidar technology using drones won't be able to pick up any tree defects, stem diameter, and other information required on cruising cards. Even tree heights should be used with caution. HOWEVER, I do see drone technology being useful in doing silviculture surveys if all the land manager is interested in is stocking density - but again it is limited in its usefulness in identifying potential health concerns.

This kind of technology has it's place, but I think there will always be a need to have boots on the ground for proper forest management. Similar to fighting a war, the air force can be utilized for initial contact and information gathering, but foot soldiers will always be required to complete the job...

[theBushman]

We sat around a campfire and hashed out how much more work it would be to take sample plots with a Lidar station for forest inventory. We'd be walking in anyway for the soils work and the rest of the ecological data. Taking ten Lidar volume sweeps would suck up a couple hours, having to move the station and then go hide from it.

The company I cruise for has two drones, and could never afford to fly our sample plots at the rate boots on the ground do them. The units aren't GlobalHawks and Predators with satellite control and midair refueling. They're driven out to the site with a flight plan loaded into the guidance system. They're prepped, tested and flown, retrieved, and driven back to the office. Then the images have to be pulled, and processed, and then the data needs to be fluffed and teased into something useful. Meanwhile, a dozen ground crews went out and collected hard data.

Sure, Free to Grow has been done from a helicopter for years. I still see companies making a living off of ground crews in Free to Grow. There's a load of information you can't get from the air, at any resolution.