About

Your role/position. Silviculture Forester for Port Blakely Ltd based in their Timaru Office (South Island).

How did you end up working in forestry. Completed B.For.Sc degree and never looked back. Always had an interest in silviculture and growing trees.

What you love about our industry. Love the variety not only in work place environments but also the variety in the type of work I get to apply myself to. Sometimes it is heavily operational based and other times quite technical or financial so I enjoy the variety.

How do you use UAVs in your work/what interest do you have in UAVs. We have a pretty old (now) phantom 4 that Mitch Cooke and I use for simple mapping jobs using UgCS software and Pix4D. We recently contracted out some work through Interpine to fly their Matrice and P1 lens.

Why do you want to be involved in TFF. Keen to see what other research outfits are doing and what other companies may be doing so we can collectively come to better practical UAV solutions.

What would you like to do through TFF if you were elected onto the committee. I would like to see the AI image library developed further as that is one issue we currently have in NZ, the establishment landscape can vary extremely wide due to weed competition, slash, ex-farm sites etc so I think getting a good image database developed would help everyone.

What do you think that TFF should be focused on. It would be interesting to hear about any other ‘Tools’ that aren’t UAV based that could be applicable to Forester roles around the country as I wouldn’t mind seeing technology develop in the space for our contractor work force as making them more efficient is just as important.

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