The Marcus Wallenberg Foundation has announced that the recipient of the Marcus Wallenberg Prize for 2011 is Professor Erik Næsset from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
The professor has been awarded for his research that includes the airborne laser scanning technique as an important component of forest inventory.
Viewed as a renewable supply source of chemical feedstock, biofuels, fibre, wood and other products, unsustainable logging practices and fragmentation has led to the degradation of forests. To ensure sustainable forest management, Professor Næsset developed a device to spatially display the required forest inventory parameters. The professor achieved the remote sensing scanning solution by using airborne laser scanning with forest field data. This combination automatically provides highly accurate forest field data and is based on light detecting and ranging (LIDAR) sensors.
A commercially-viable technique, it allows for cost reductions in forest management inventories of around 40% to 50%. The laser scanning technique also makes it useful for assessing forest ecosystems.