Clean, fresh water is essential for life. As land-use intensification and climate change place growing pressure on water resources, it is vital that we manage water use sustainably. Planted forests can be managed to provide beneficial water outcomes, given adequate science information. However, forest hydrology science in New Zealand is hopelessly out of date.
Forest Flows - creating water-resilient landscapes $13.7 million proposal was successfully funded through the 2019 NZ MBIE Endeavour funding round. Over the next five years, Scion along with its 13 New Zealand and international research collaborators will take a fundamentally new approach to investigate and quantify the key mechanisms in water use, storage, and release in planted forests.
Digital Twin - Pulse of the forest
The bold goal of this programme is to create a new biophysical forest hydrology model combining cutting edge remote sensing techniques with terrestrial based measurements, integrating data and enabling scale, from tree, to stand, to forest to catchment, as a digital model applicable to planted forests all over New Zealand.
These extrapolations will be made possible through detailed analysis and simulation capability, and coupled with powerful tools including visualisation and enabling access to insights, achieving this Forest Digital Twin will be a major breakthrough for hydrology research internationally.
