Lidar workshop in João Pessoa, Brazil

I've spent the past few days in João Pessao on the very Eastern tip of Brazil - the city where the sun rises first! I can certainly confirm that the sunrises are pretty spectacular - swimming off the beach from my hotel at dawn is pretty special, particularly looking back at the weirdly retro/futurist James Bond villain hotel.

Seeing the sun first in all the Americas!

The Hotel Tropical Tambau, with missile silo, shark tank and concrete nuclear bunker.

I was invited as part of the XVIIth Brazilian Symposium on Remote Sensing (XVII SBSR), a biennial science meeting for Brazilian agencies and specialists in remote sensing. The Brazilian government has invested heavily in remote sensing infrastructure and training for environmental monitoring over the last two decades, particularly in an effort to monitor and control deforestation and degradation, but more widely to support mapping, commercial and conservation activities. I was invited by Dr. Veraldo Liesenberg, a lidar expert from the Department of Forest Engineering (DEF), Santa Catarina State University (UDESC), to come and help lead a workshop in lidar remote sensing for forest mapping and monitoring, in conjunction with Dr. Akira Kato from the School of Horticulture, Chiba University, Japan. The workshop was run over the weekend prior to the main meeting (along side a range of other courses) and was aimed at showcasing the utility of lidar, both TLS and ALS, and in combination with image and other data, for addressing forest science. 

The meeting was held at the very new and shiny "Centro de Congresso de João Pessoa" of João Pessoa city, Brazil. The local authority have built the centre to attract large conferences o the region.

The workshop seemed to go down well and we had around 20 attendees who were mostly students, but also some postdocs, in Brazilian universities, all interested in what lidar could do for them. We presented new results from our work in ALS and TLS, and then ran a series of practicals looking at lidar data and some of the free tools that can be used to handle them, including Cloud Compare, Fusion, WEB-lidar, libLAS and so on. It was definitely an interesting meeting and I met a number of people with interests in our TLS work, and who potentially have plots and data that would be mutually beneficial. 

Everyone wants UAVs. And lidar.

There was also a large commercial expo as part of the conference, showcasing some very interesting new developments in UAV and ground-based tech. UAVs appear to be particularly attractive here due to the relatively lower cost of entry than many other, piloted systems. And the instrumentation and software is obviously advancing rapidly to allow exploitation of these platforms. 

New ESA Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

The new ESA Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) I've been involved with has now gone live. The MOOC is a free, 5 session course of 2-3 hours a wekk, providing an introduction to monitoring of climate with satellites. It's aimed at policy makers, students, and anyone with a general interest in climate and so it's not technical. I was involved as one of the presenters, but don't let that put you off - some of the other bits are excellent. Please circulate to anyone you think might be interested. There's some really interesting bits on the solid earth, fires, the cryosphere, oceans, atmosphere and then other services which depend on EO data.


The course information page is here https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/climate-from-space and you can see some clips from our trip to the Amazon in the trailer below (e.g. at 2:19 - 2:30).

TLS demo for students and a nice view of the UCL quad

We took the TLS instrument out into the quad here at UCL yesterday, to demonstrate the capabilities of the instrument for collecting 3D data, and what you need to do in order to process those data into something useful. Thanks to Andy and Kim who set up the demo - you can recognise various people in the scan if you know them! They cast long shadows in the UCL quad (literally, rather than metaphorically, although ......).

Euronews!

The Reuters piece has been slightly extended and re-edited with some different material from me, and some additional animations (not from me) resulting in the following:
http://www.euronews.com/2015/01/26/laser-scanning-trees/
The piece makes a few different points, mainly about the methods, but also discusses the Brazil work a little more.

Short Reuters interview

The short interview I did for Reuters Technology is up. It showcases the recent Australia work in Kim's MEE paper but also the initial flythrough from Caixuana.


http://www.reuters.com/video/2015/01/14/3d-laser-mapping-weighs-trees?videoId=361763887&videoChannel=6&channelName=Technology

ESA BIOMASS mission science meeting

This week at ESA's Earth Observation HQ (ESRIN) in Frascati, scientists with an interest in measuring forest C stocks and biomass more generally, are meeting to discuss the science aims and challenges of the ESA BIOMASS Earth Explorer mission. BIOMASS will make routine observations of P band (70 cm) radar, which is related to the amount of standing C in forests. 

ESA's BIOMASS mission: a slightly dodgy artist's impression (from ESA)

The meeting is to start thrashing out what exactly what we need to do to make the most of BIOMASS observations. In particular, there is a big focus on calibration and validation activities - BIOMASS will rely on calibration of the radar signal against other measures of C stocks, particularly from ground plots, but also airborne lidar. These will all rely in some way or another on allometry, and this is where the TLS comes in. There is a huge need for accurate estimates of C stocks from plot data, hence my invite to come and show what we can do and how this might be a very effective way of augmenting plot data and linking to airborne lidar for cal/val. This is an interesting and varied meeting, as it brings together a wide range of including forest and conservation experts, ecologists, lidar, radar and other EO specialists, modellers and so on. Good to see Ralph Dubayah here, long-tome lidar champion and PI of the NASA GEDI mission to be launched on the ISS around the same time as BIOMASS (2019), and which will make highly-complementary measurements. 

New results from Caxiuana

We're gradually going through the data from the Brazil trip, learning as we go. But the results so far are definitely very positive - all the hard work in laying out the targets systematically seems to have paid off in that the registration is better than we could have hoped for really. Andy's put in a great effort to get the drought plot done, and from what we can see there are very few areas where the registration of one scan to the next is anything other than excellent. Good news! The first fly through is done - again, props Andy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4-xBCQ291M&feature=youtu.be

A 100 x 5 m slice (40 M points) through the drought plot showing the beautiful detail of the canopy profile.

Here's a zoom in of the slice.

Here's a second slice through the plot - again, coloured by height (note the slice through the runnels on the bottom).

Finally, here's a zoom in of the above slice, with the rainfall runnels more visible.