Environmental managers will have a powerful new resource for helping our forests survive and recover from wildfire, drought and disease. UC Davis ecologist Derek Young is leading a team to develop the Open Forest Observatory, a pioneering project combining drone photography and forest mapping with machine learning, remote sensing, big-data crunching and open information sourcing. The observatory will offer technology so friendly that users will need only a few weeks to learn it, instead of a year. And, for the first time, the project will make the resulting database available in a central repository. “We'll be producing the data and the tools to help others address vexing forest ecology and land management questions,” explained Young, an ecologist with the Department of Plant Sciences.
