David Coomes

Anthropogenic climate change and over-exploitation of natural resources are fundamentally altering biogeochemical cycling and biodiversity at the planetary scale.  New remote sensing techniques are needed to monitor these changes and inform policy decisions aimed at abating the impacts of humans and protecting areas of outstanding value for conservation.  I will discuss the emerging use of LiDAR, hyperspectral imaging and thermal imaging to monitor forests, and will highlight some of the technical challenges that lie ahead.  

David Coomes is Professor of forest ecology and conservation, working on applications of cutting-edge remote sensing technologies to improve forest management.  As part of a recent project in Malaysia, he discovered the tallest trees in the tropics using airborne laser scanning and showed that biogeochemical cycling is not less strongly affected by logging than previously thought.