About Us

TreeMetrics is an Irish software company formed in 2005 to commercially exploit an identified need in the international forest industry. The company has built a strong experienced team with the required forestry, technological and sales skills. Its founders and principal shareholders have many years hands-on experience in the forest industry from operations, sales and service.

TreeMetrics is a provider of commercial forestry measurement systems. The innovative system being developed by TreeMetrics allows for more accurate and cost effective measurement of trees prior to harvesting. This enables growers to sell their trees at the optimum representative price and for purchasers to improve their product recovery.

The company has been established to service this identified need for the Forest industry worldwide.

The company’s initial development was funded by the promoters with additional R&D funding from COFORD (The Council for Forest Research and Development). As part of this development the TreeScan project compared manual and harvester head measurements with the TreeMetrics measurement method. The results of this project can be obtained from TreeMetrics via their contact page.

Additional validation projects are currently being planned for Ireland and Austria during May 2006.

TreeMetrics have been named as Schweighofer “Innovation in Forestry” prize winners in 2005 as recognition of their leading edge
development in the forestry space. The Schweighofer Prize is a recognised European wide Forestry Industry award, awarded on the basis of outstanding innovative achievements in research and industry from all phases of the timber production chain, showing a European dimension and doing justice to the principles of sustentation.”

Industry Overview

The forest environment is a particularly complex and irregular one when it comes to measuring and valuing it. The current methods used in forest measurement require predictive formulas developed from past analysis of forest growth. These formulae try to predict average stem volume from a diameter measurement taken at the base of the stem and the average crop height. Current techniques give no indication of the quality of the crop. Therefore, many foresters and saw millers are sceptical about the effectiveness of this current system.

At present, forest crops are assessed to different levels and for different purposes, e.g. volume quantification, quality assessment for pre-harvest valuation and growth rates. For planning and decision making up-to-date accurate data is needed in order to evaluate the range of potential options for the future development of the forest. Conventional measurements are obtained by manual ground-based methods, using measuring tapes or hand-held electronic data collection equipment such as electronic callipers and data loggers.

TreeMetrics has carried out research on evaluating the basic operating principles of Laser Scanner technology in forest environments. The basic principles behind their operation and measurement methodologies ensure that this technology is very suitable for highly automated multi-purpose forest inventories.

Having validated the effectiveness of the hardware to operate in forest environments, TreeMetrics has begun the development of a range of software necessary to translate the raw data from the scanner into information relevant to forest growers, managers and timber buyers.