Forest Health Monitoring

Scion supports the development of new systems to quantify pest impacts and monitor long-term health trends.

This expertise enables forest growers to oversee the condition of their resource and to understand the link between forest health and productivity.

Our key capabilities

  • Forest health assessments – Defining key measures of forest health and developing systems for efficient monitoring of these factors, including crown health and classification models.
  • Remote sensing – Developing methods for the remote and real-time monitoring of forest health condition.
  • Risk and hazard ratings – Combining productivity models with risk and hazard ratings for particular pests and diseases to enable site selection and targeted management.
  • Forest productivity modelling– Quantifying the relationships between forest canopy damage and loss of productivity. Models can be used to predict rotation length impacts arising from different levels and types of damage.

Examples of our achievements

Forest Health Monitoring

Scion has developed a system for monitoring long-term trends in forest health. This is based on the system used in Europe for over 25 years, but modified to suit fast growing New Zealand plantation forests. The New Zealand system focuses on crown transparency and allows many more plots to be assessed in a day than overseas systems. It has been tested operationally and reference material for assessors (photo guides and user manuals) is being prepared as part of a Sustainable Farming Fund project led by the NZ Forest Owners Association.

Modelling climate change effects

Scion completed a study funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry that evaluates the potential impacts of climate change on the productivity of New Zealand’s planted forests. As well as evaluating the direct vulnerability of forests to adverse climatic events, indirect factors such as weeds, insects and fire were also considered.

A range of modelling studies has examined the risk of specific forest pests both currently and under climate change. Species include gumleaf skeletoniser (Uraba lugens) pitch canker and Dothistroma.

Contact : Lindsay Bulman