Researcher Langning Huo won this year's SLU Umeå and Sparbanksstiftelsen Norrland Innovation Award for her groundbreaking idea to use new sensor technology to detect forest damage. The innovation could protect forests and strengthen Europe's efforts to make forests more resilient to bark beetle infestations in a warmer climate.
The spruce bark beetle is one of the greatest threats to Swedish forests, and one of the biggest challenges is detecting infested trees early, before visible changes occur in the tree crowns. Traditional remote sensing technologies, which use sensors with 3–9 spectral bands, miss many trees because they do not measure at the wavelengths most sensitive to the early physiochemical changes during an infestation.
Langning's groundbreaking innovation uses a hyperspectral camera with 448 spectral bands and identifies a green band at 530 nm (G530), which is much more sensitive to physiochemical changes than the previously used band at 560 nm. With G530, the detection rate of stressed trees increased from 28% to 80%. She has also developed a simplified stress index highlighting the potential of G530. This could revolutionize forest monitoring and provide forest owners and authorities with better tools to manage damage and reduce future losses.
"This is a transformative change for forestry," says Langning. "With this technology, we can not only save forests from being attacked by bark beetles and reduce economic loss, but also help achieve environmental goals set at national and European levels."
Langning now hopes that the technology will be integrated into satellites and drones to enable monitoring at both local and European levels.
“The winning idea has succeeded in seeing things no one has seen before. The jury believes that it is a simple yet scalable solution with great potential to solve an important problem for the forestry industry.”