About Enhanced Forest Inventory (EFI)

The Canadian Wood Fibre Centre along with numerous partners has developed a national enhanced forest inventory system that maps wood fibre characteristics at the management unit scale. The system provides forest industry with strategic and operational data that can feed optimization and planning programs with detailed outside and inside bark properties so companies can better plan operations in a cost competitive and sustainable manner. The system uses traditional forest inventory technologies such as imagery and ground plots along with newer technologies such as Enhanced Imagery, Airborne LiDAR, terrestrial LiDAR, and Silvascan to produce complete digital wall-to-wall coverage of a management unit. The outputs can be utilized to lower costs in road placement, construction, and maintenance, provide appropriate data to optimize harvesting costs, and direct wood to the more efficient mill. Outputs can also be used to plan the appropriate equipment to acquire to match the characteristics of future harvest blocks, plan product development based upon future wood fibre characteristics, and plan harvest blocks based upon milling requirements. A more sustainable and competitive forest industry can be realized by directing the right wood to the right mill at the right time. The enhanced forest inventory provides the data required to achieve this goal.

LiDAR