Nicholas Coops

University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Forest Resources Management

Climate change has significantly impacted the wildfire regimes in lodgepole pine forests, resulting in prolonged fire seasons and altered fire behaviour. In North America, fire patterns have shifted towards more frequent and severe wildfires after a century of fire suppression. In response, silviculture practices in fire-prone areas should aim to r...

Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) has been the subject of decades of applied research and development in forest management. ALS data are spatially explicit, capable of accurately characterizing vegetation structure and underlying terrain, and can be used to produce value-added products for terrestrial carbon assessments, hydrology, and biodiversity amo...

Western North America has seen a recent dramatic increase in large and often high‐severity wildfires. After forest fire, understanding patterns of structural recovery is important, as recovery patterns impact critical ecosystem services. Continuous forest monitoring provided by satellite observations is particularly beneficial to capture the pivota...

Integrating airborne laser scanning (ALS) forest attributes with photo-interpreted forest stand age and species attributes can provide managers with the best information to drive estate planning, growth and yield projections, and forest operations. Photo-interpreted forest inventories provide certain forest attributes that are difficult to measure...

Proximally-sensed laser scanning offers significant potential for automated forest data capture, but challenges remain in automatically identifying tree species without additional ground data. Deep learning (DL) shows promise for automation, yet progress is slowed by the lack of large, diverse, openly available labeled datasets of single tree point...

Natural climate solutions (NCSs) are conservation, restoration, and improved land management actions that have potential to provide climate mitigation across different land cover types. NCS related to forests offer a significant portion of cost-effective NCS mitigation required to limit warming to below 2 °C. Afforestation—planting trees in areas w...

Data for benchmarking tree species classification from proximally-sensed laser scanning data. The data can be downloaded at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13255198

Species' habitats are strongly influenced by the 3‐dimensional (3D) structure of ecosystems. The dominant technique used to measure 3D structure is Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS), a type of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology. Airborne Laser Scanning captures fine‐scale structural information over large spatial extents and provides useful...

The essential biodiversity variables (EBV) framework has been proposed as a monitoring system of standardized, comparable variables that represents a minimum set of biological information to monitor biodiversity change at large spatial extents. Six classes of EBVs (genetic composition, species populations, species traits, community composition, eco...

Laser scanning sensors mounted on drones enable on-demand quantification of forest structure through the collection of high-density point clouds (500+ points m−2). These point clouds facilitate the detection of individual trees enabling the quantification of growth-related variables within a stand that can inform precision management. We present a...

Timely and detailed inventories of forest resources are of critical importance to guiding sustainable forest management decisions. As forests occur across large spatial extents, remotely sensed data are often used to augment conventional forest inventory measurements. When combined with field plot measurements, airborne laser scanning (ALS) data ca...

Texture, soil organic matter (SOM), and soil depth (SoD) are crucial properties in forest management because they can supply spatial information on forest site productivity and guide fertilizer applications. However, soil properties possess an inherent uncertainty that must be mapped to enhance decision making in management applications. Most digit...

Airborne hyperspectral imaging holds great promise for estimating plant diversity and composition, given its unprecedented combination of aerial coverage, spatial resolution, and spectral detail. Recently, there has been renewed attention toward the spectral variation hypothesis (SVH), which predicts that higher spectral variation is correlated wit...

Forest ecosystems and timber products are expected to play a determining role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. As the frequency and severity of natural disturbances increase, remote sensing technologies prove crucial for detecting and assessing the impact of natural disturbance on forest condition and productivity. Although satellite-ba...

Forest roads provide access to remote wooded areas, serving as key transportation routes and contributing to human impact on the local environment. However, large animals, such as bears (Ursus sp.), moose (Alces alces), and caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou), are affected by their presence. Many publicly available road layers are outdated or inacc...

Habitat disturbance is a major driver of the decline of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) in Canada. Different disturbance agents and regimes negatively impact caribou populations to different degrees. It is therefore critical that land managers and scientists studying caribou have a detailed understanding of the disturbance regimes affe...

The northern forest-tundra ecotone is one of the fastest warming regions of the globe. Models of vegetation change generally predict a northward advance of boreal forests and corresponding retreat of the tundra. Previous satellite remote sensing analyses in this region have focused on mapping vegetation greenness and tree cover derived from optical...

Globally, wildfires burn an average of approximately 5.5 Mha of forest per year. Deriving a detailed inventory of forest fuel conditions is critical to managing resources both before and during a fire. However, data products that form the basis of these inventories often come from disparate sources, may not be subject to update, or may not capture...

The National Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring System (NTEMS) was developed by the Canadian Forest Service to provide national-scale baseline information on Canada's forested ecosystems. Based largely on data from the Landsat series of satellites, free and open access to analysis ready data, and utilization of high performance computing, NTEMS enabl...

A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Tree species proportions PointAugment DGCNN Single-photon lidar Forest resource inventory A B S T R A C T Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data is increasingly being used for accurate estimations of forest inventory attributes, such as tree height and volume. However, determining tree species information, an important a...

Aim There is widespread support that species richness increases with the available energy of an ecosystem, but the mechanisms underlying this driver of biodiversity patterns remain elusive. We evaluated gradients of functional diversity to test whether the higher species richness of productive, structurally diverse environments is due to a greater...

Increasing temperature and changes in water dynamics are bringing uncertainty regarding the future productivity of boreal forests, even in the absence of stand-replacing disturbances. There is accumulating evidence that water deficits caused by warmer summer temperatures are linked to decreases in the growth rate of boreal tree species in some regi...

Deep neural network (DNN) Airborne laser scanning (ALS) Tree component biomass DGCNN Octree-CNN (OCNN) Model comparison A B S T R A C T Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data has been widely used for total aboveground tree biomass (AGB) modelling, however, there is less research focusing on estimating specific tree biomass components (wood, branches, b...

The advent of new spaceborne imaging spectrometers offers new opportunities for ecologists to map vegetation traits at global scales. However, to date most imaging spectroscopy studies exploiting satellite spectrometers have been constrained to the landscape scale. In this paper we present a new method to map vegetation traits at the landscape scal...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide necessary context and demonstrate different approaches for image composite generation when using data quality flags, using an initial example of removing cloud cover. We will examine different filtering options, demonstrate an approach for cloud masking, and provide additional opportunities for image compos...

Timely monitoring of crop production using a remote sensing-based approach offers promise toward enhancing food security. Statistical models developed using satellite data typically employ a single vegetation index from a single sensor for yield estimation. With the increasing availability of satellite datasets, there is now an opportunity to inves...

Climate change interacts with ecological processes leading to changes in tree and forest growth rate, biome shifts and species composition, all of which are influenced by disturbances. This study explores future overarching climate trends of eight of Canada's ecozones containing managed forests. For the 2071 to 2100 period, climate projections indi...

The rate and extent of global biodiversity change is surpassing our ability to measure, monitor and forecast trends. We propose an interconnected worldwide system of observation networks — a global biodiversity observing system (GBiOS) — to coordinate monitoring worldwide and inform action to reach international biodiversity targets.

Common-garden trials of forest trees provide phenotype data used to assess growth and local adaptation; this information is foundational to tree breeding programs, genecology, and gene conservation. As jurisdictions consider assisted migration strategies to match populations to suitable climates, in situ progeny and provenance trials provide experi...

Remote sensing technology offers the ability to derive information on freshwater fish habitats across broad geographic areas and has the potential to transform approaches to monitoring. However, the numerous platforms, sensors and analytical software that are available may overwhelm those interested in utilizing this important technology and thus l...

Animals select habitat at multiple spatial scales, suggesting that biodiversity modeling, for example of species richness, should be based on environmental data gathered at multiple spatial scales, and especially multiple grain sizes. Different satellite sensors collect data at different spatial resolutions and therefore provide opportunities for m...

Riparian areas are an integral component of the forest hydrologic system. However, systematic management and conservation of riparian vegetation remains a challenge when the extent and nature of riparian vegetation is not easily characterized. Thus, describing riparian vegetation structural attributes and mapping riparian extent is important for st...

Forest inventories provide information regarding the status of a range of attributes as well as enabling predictive applications. Growth and yield models are essential tools for sustainable forest management, importantly enabling projections of future forest conditions (such as height growth). To select the most appropriate growth trajectory, site...

Bitemporal airborne laser scanning (ALS) data are increasingly being used in forest management inventories for the determination of site index (SI). SI determination using bitemporal ALS data requires undisturbed height growth of dominant trees. Therefore, areas with disturbed top height development are unsuitable for SI determination, and should b...

We investigated the physical habitat associations and movement of sympatric rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and Dolly Varden char (Salvelinus malma) during summer in five tributary streams of the Upper Nahmint River, British Columbia, Canada. The ecology of juvenile salmonids is well-studied, but studies involving these species in sympatry are...

Conventionally, forest management plans have focused on ensuring a continuous provision of wood. In recent years, political agendas worldwide have recognized the importance of forests' cultural ecosystem services, such as recreation. However, the inclusion of such values in management plans is challenging, and forest managers require novel methodol...

Knowledge about the condition and location of forest roads is important for forest management. Coupling accurate forest road information with planning and conservation strategies supports forest resource management. In Canada, spatial data of forestry road networks are available provincially; however, they lack spatial accuracy, and up-to-date info...

Forest management activities intended to reduce wildfire risk rely on accurate characterizations of the amount and arrangement of canopy and surface fuels. Metrics that describe these fuels are typically estimated with various systems that transform plot-level field data into metrics that can be used within fire behaviour models. Remote sensing dat...

Leaf spectra are integrated foliar phenotypes that capture a range of traits and can provide insight into ecological processes. Leaf traits, and therefore leaf spectra, may reflect belowground processes such as mycorrhizal associations. However, evidence for the relationship between leaf traits and mycorrhizal association is mixed, and few studies...

Non-stand-replacing disturbances are major drivers of northern hardwood forest dynamics, but are more challenging to characterize using satellite imagery than stand-replacing events. This study proposes a hurdle approach in which disturbance causal agents are first attributed to permanent sample plots that were either partially harvested, had susta...

Accurate information on road location is critical for forest management and conservation strategies. Road location data supports the analysis of road accessibility and usability and is a critical information layer for forest harvest, financial planning, wildfire suppression, and protection activities. The global expanse of forests, their remoteness...

Instream wood is a critical component of proper aquatic ecosystem function. The accurate detection and mapping of instream wood is of key importance for sustainable forest management due to the impact that instream wood features have on stream morphology, sediment distribution, and habitat availability for numerous aquatic species. The increasing a...

Background An accurate understanding of wildfire impacts is critical to the success of any post-fire management framework. Fire severity maps are typically created from satellite-derived imagery that are capable of mapping fires across large spatial extents, but cannot detect damage to individual trees. In recent years, higher resolution fire sever...

Spatially and temporally precise monitoring of forest resources is becoming increasingly vital in rapidly changing environmental and economic conditions. However, recent developments in moderate resolution satellite imagery have led to spectrally consistent and temporally dense datasets capable of capturing both seasonal variation and long-term tra...

Aim Predicting biodiversity responses to global changes requires good models of species' distributions. Both environmental conditions and human activities determine population density patterns. However, quantifying the relationship between wildlife population densities and their underlying environmental conditions across large geographical scales h...

Plant ecologists use functional traits to describe how plants respond to and influence their environment. Reflectance spectroscopy can provide rapid, non‐destructive estimates of leaf traits, but it remains unclear whether general trait‐spectra models can yield accurate estimates across functional groups and ecosystems. We measured leaf spectra and...

Establishing field inventories can be labor intensive, logistically challenging and expensive. Optimizing a sample to derive accurate forest attribute predictions is a key management-level inventory objective. Traditional sampling designs involving pre-defined, interpreted strata could result in poor selection of within-strata sampling intensities,...

The Canadian Wood Fibre Centre (CWFC) of the Canadian Forest Service is working with other federal organizations in Canada, FPInnovations, and provincial, industrial, and academic partners to develop enhanced forest inventory systems that incorporate airborne laser scanning (ALS), digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP), terrestrial laser scanning (TLS...

The distribution of different vegetation types is important information for landscape management, especially in the context of tackling global environmental change. Vegetation types can be mapped using satellite and airborne passive remote sensing. However, spectrally similar yet structurally different vegetation types, like different tree-dominate...

The advent of CubeSat constellations is revolutionizing the ability to observe Earth systems through time. The improved spatial and temporal resolutions from these data could assist in tracking forest harvesting by forest management companies or government organizations interested in monitoring the sustainable management of forest resources. Howeve...

Knowledge of tree species is required to inform management, planning, and monitoring of forests as well as to characterize habitat and ecosystem function. Remotely sensed data and spatial modeling enable mapping of tree species presence and distribution. Following an assessment of tree species identified in the sample-based National Forest Inventor...

The importance placed by policy-makers on cultural ecosystem services (CES) is on the rise worldwide, inducing a growing interest in the development of innovative approaches for their mapping, characterization, and assessment. Previous studies have shown how the analysis of the content of geotagged images shared on social media can be used to shed...