Robin J L Hartley

Scion · Autonomous Systems

Silvicultural operations such as planting, pruning, and thinning are vital for the forest value chain, requiring efficient monitoring to prevent value loss. While effective, traditional field plots are time-consuming, costly, spatially limited, and rely on assumptions that they adequately represent a wider area. Alternatively, unmanned aerial vehic...

Purpose of Review Since the late 1990s, researchers have been increasingly utilising digital methodologies to assess the branch structure of trees. The emergence of commercial terrestrial laser scanners during this period catalysed an entirely new domain focused on point cloud-based research. Over the years, this field has transformed from a comple...

The management of plantation forests using precision forestry requires advanced inventory methods. Unmanned aerial vehicle laser scanning (ULS) offers a cost-effective approach to accurately estimate forest structural attributes at both plot and individual tree levels. We examined the utility of ULS data collected from a radiata pine stand for tree...

In the original publication, there was a mistake in the legend for Table 1 [...]

Abstract The assembly and function of the phyllosphere microbiome is important to the overall fitness of plants and, thereby, the ecosystems they inhabit. Presently, model systems for tree phyllosphere microbiome studies are lacking, yet forests resilient to pests, diseases, and climate change are important to support a myriad of ecosystem services...

Background: Complex interactions between fuel structure and fire substantially affect fire spread and spatial variability in fire behaviour. Heterogeneous arrangement of the fuel coupled with variability in fuel characteristics can impact heat transfer efficiency, preheating of unburned fuel and consequent ignition and spread. Aim: Study the influ...

Dothistroma needle blight, caused by the fungi Dothistroma septosporum and D. pini is globally one of the most damaging diseases of pine species. Infection from the pathogen, which is initiated in the lower crown, causes needle chlorosis, loss of cellular integrity, necrosis and premature needle loss with this developmental sequence impacting key p...

The classification and quantification of fuel is traditionally a labour-intensive, costly and often subjective operation, especially in hazardous vegetation types, such as gorse (Ulex europaeus L.) scrub. In this study, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies were assessed as an alternative to traditional field methodologies for fuel characteris...

Phenotyping has been a reality for aiding the selection of optimal crops for specific environments for decades in various horticultural industries. However, until recently, phenotyping was less accessible to tree breeders due to the size of the crop, the length of the rotation and the difficulty in acquiring detailed measurements. With the advent o...

This article presents a review about Beyond Visual Line Of Sight (BVLOS) operations using unmanned aircraft in forest environments. Forest environments present unique challenges for unmanned aircraft operations due to the presence of trees as obstacles, hilly terrain, and remote areas. BVLOS operations help overcome some of these unique challenges;...

This paper brings together perspectives on the future of forestry from academia, research and industry. A diverse group of people have been interviewed from the University of Canterbury, Toi Ohomai, Forest Growers Research (FGR), Scion, Port Blakely Ltd, Forest Protection Services Ltd and Forest Management Ltd. The results highlight the unprecedent...

The use of structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is becoming an increasingly popular means of characterising key forestry biophysical variables such as tree height. Despite the wide array of software that is available to process 3D point clouds from SfM, little research has investigated how the precision of...

Complex interactions between fuel structure and fire highly affects the fire spread efficiency and localized behaviour. Heterogeneous arrangement of the fuel coupled with variability in fuel characteristics can strengthen or hinder heat transfer efficiency, preheating of unburned fuel and consecutive ignition. In this study, we leverage recently de...

Background: From 2016, wildfire emergency response used Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) also known as Uninhabited or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Systems (UAS) or "drones" (hereafter UAS), smartphones and smartphone applications (apps) on-site, for the first time at scale in Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter New Zealand). This study o...

Field-scale imaging spectroscopy for measuring nutrients and photosynthesis parameters. Correlation of N and P to Vcmax and Jmax only exists in N- (respective P-) limited trees.

The measurement of forestry trials is a costly and time-consuming process. Over the past few years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have provided some significant developments that could improve cost and time efficiencies. However, little research has examined the accuracies of these technologies for measuring young trees. This study compared the d...

Spatial prediction of photosynthesis requires an understanding of how foliage nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) regulate this process and the relationship between these elements and scalable spectral proxies. Hyperspectral imagery has been used to predict important photosynthetic variables such as the maximum rate of carboxylation (Vcmax) and electro...

The prediction of carbon uptake by forests across fertility gradients requires accurate characterisation of how biochemical limitations to photosynthesis respond to variation in key elements such as nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). Over the last decade, proxies for chlorophyll and photosynthetic activity have been extracted from hyperspectral image...

Wilding conifers, the naturally regenerated scions of exotic conifer species, are a major ecological and economic issue in New Zealand. Hyperspectral imagery could provide a useful means of monitoring the efficacy of wilding control measures but little research has examined this possibility. Data were collected from an experiment, that included thi...

The development and proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in recent years presents a new data collection opportunity for invasive alien plant (IAP) research. The flexibility and cost‐efficiency of these craft offers a valuable solution where high‐spatial or high‐temporal resolution remotely sensed data are required. In this paper, we revi...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and remote image sensing cameras have considerable potential for use in pest control operations. UAVs equipped with remote sensing cameras could be flown over forests and remnant bush sites, particularly those not currently receiving any pest control, to record the unique spectral signature of the vegetation and to d...

Because of the scale involved in forestry, both time and area, mathematics has always been heavily employed so foresters can take samples and calculate averages or make predictions on the growth or yield of their crop. With the advent of increasingly usable and accessible aerial remote sensing techniques, in particular UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)...