In the 19th Century, a lumberjack would tap a tree with his axe and listen to the sound, which would indicate rot, hollowness or good health. In the 21st Century, forest managers can remotely interrogate online data to identify individual trees in a far-off forest and monitor their health, revealing any physical damage from fire, drought or disease.
Lee Stamm, who is employed by Forestry Corporation of NSW, has recently completed a Gottstein Fellowship detailing the latest generation Geiger Mode Light Detection and Ranging ( LiDAR ) and advanced processing techniques, which allow for remote capture of data accurate enough to identify individual native species trees.
Foresters would be well versed with LiDAR which has been around about 60 years, but the far more powerful next generation of Geiger mode LiDAR made its first commercial application in 2015. This relatively new technique can detect single photons reflected from deep in the forest canopy to help build a picture of each individual tree, known as a single tree inventory. Interrogating the massive data load is only made possible through machine learning— a subset of AI that trains algorithms to learn from data and make decisions or predictions without being programmed explicitly.
The Gottstein Trust, or, by its full name the Joseph William Gottstein Memorial Trust Fund, is a national educational trust started in 1971 to encourage innovation within Australia’s renewable wood products and forestry industry. As a recipient of a Gottstein Fellowship, Stamm was able to visit organisations in Scandinavia and North America which routinely use data covering millions of hectares, detailing derived single tree points and mapping products for foresters in the form of Digital Twins. Digital Twins which mirror large and complex physical systems are well known in automotive and aerospace engineering worlds but relatively new in forestry.
Stamm’s report states that, “One use case for Digital Twins … is the ability to temporally and spatially visualise larger habitat trees that are legislated to be retained in perpetuity within NSW native forests under the Coastal Integrated Forestry Operations Approval (CIFOA) process. Within a Digital Twin, defining their existence before harvest, and monitoring their persistence during and after harvesting ensures regulatory compliance”.
For forest managers, the data within a digital twin model, segmented to single tree inventory, can also be used to identify fuel loads (and flammability) combined with past, current and predicted climate data to inform to mitigate the risk from un-managed fires.
“Being awarded the fellowship by The Gottstein Trust was a valuable opportunity to deepen my understanding of how companies and researchers worldwide are measuring forests”, said Stamm.
“I gained insights into the technologies available to help land managers work more efficiently and safely. This knowledge enables me to contribute meaningfully to shaping strategic research priorities for the forest industry and land management agencies,” he went on to say.
Please note: Applications are open for the 2025 round of Gottstein Trust fellowships. Scholarships and Skills Development Grants until midnight Monday, 27 October 2025
