2026 Hybrid OLI and GMUG Meeting

April 21 - 22, 2026

Mark your calendars for the Operational Lidar Inventory (OLI) and Growth Model User’s Group (GMUG) 2026 two-day joint meeting. This event provides an opportunity for information exchange on the operational or near-operational usage of remote sensing technologies in forest inventory and mapping applications as well as all things growth modeling related.

The 2026 Hybrid OLI and GMUG Annual Meeting will be held on April 21st and 22nd at the Water Resources Education Center in Vancouver WA, USA. Both days will facilitate in-person and virtual participation.

Location: Water Resources Education Center 4600 SE Columbia Way, Vancouver, WA 98661

Online Registration

These links will take you to a seperate page to register & pay

Day 1 Only : OLI Workshop Day 2 Only : GMUG Workshop DAY 1 + 2 : Joint OLI & GMUG Meeting

Operational Lidar Inventory (OLI) – April 21, 9 AM to 5 PM

2026 Operational Lidar Inventory (OLI) Workshop Agenda

8:30 Coffee Mingle / Setup

8:45 • Keynote: Considerations for Remote Sensing Integration with Growth and Yield (Aaron Weiskittel, Greg Johnson, David Marshall, U Maine)

9:45 Break

10:05 • Incorporating terrestrial and airborne laser scanning into research and inventory applications (Phil Radtke, Virginia Tech)

10:30 • Comparison of photogrammetric point clouds and neural network canopy height models (Bryce Frank, PNW Research Station)

10:55 Break

11:15 • Verifying Enhanced Forest Inventories - A Forest Carbon Offset Verifier's Perspective Al Pancoast, SCS Global Services

11:40 • Random Forest-Based Small Area Estimation Using LiDAR and Cruise Plots in Southern Pine (Jacob Strunk, Nathaniel Naumann, Rayonier)

12:05 Hosted Lunch Break

1:05 • Challenges in aligning aerial and terrestrial laser scans: SLAM vs RTK GPS (Avishek Hamal, Michael Winfield, Bogdan Strimbu, Oregon State U.)

1:30 • Beyond the Stand: A Billion-Tree, Species-Level Inventory in Mixed Northern Hardwoods (Maurice LeBlanc, Mike Parlow, Cam Brown, Forsite)

1:55 Break

2:15 • Satellite Derived Deciduous Understory Heat Maps of Post-Thin Stands (William Skinner, Rayonier)

2:40 • Extraction of height growth increments from paired temporal point clouds: LiDAR + LiDAR & LiDAR + 3D NAIP (Steevensen Alcius & UofI Digital Forest Lab)

3:05 • TreeDGS: Aerial Gaussian Splatting for Direct DBH and Height Measurement of Southern Yellow Pines (Michael Wu, Coolant.earth)

3:30 Break

3:50 • Remote Sensing Based Digital Inventory and Management System for Urban Forestry (Kelsey Watkins, NV5)

4:15 • Enhancing Natural Resource Management and Operational Efficiency with a Digital Inventory® (Garrett Jones, Northwest Management Inc)

4:40 End

Growth Model User Group (GMUG) – April 22, 9 AM to 5 PM

2026 Growth Model Users Group Meeting Agenda

9:00 – 9:30 Keynote - Integrating LiDAR with Growth and Yield Models

Piotr Tompalski (Canadian Forest Service)

9:30 - 12:00 Growth Model Updates (30m Each)

CIPSANON Updates - Doug Mainwaring (Center for Intensive Planted-forest Silviculture) Doug and crew have been busy in the field and lab this year. Doug will brief us on updates and the future for CIPSANON and collaborations with remote sensing researchers at OSU.

Forest Projection System: FBRI Updates - Dan Opalach (Forest Biometrics Research Institute) Dan and the FBRI team have been busy with publishing and applied research projects with promising applications. Dan will review FBRI accomplishments in 2026 and important FPS developments in the works.

FVS Updates - Mark Castle (Forest Vegetation Simulator Group, USFS) The FVS Group integrated the new NSVB biomass equations in FVS. What next? Mark will give us an overview of the “carbon” project with discussion about the 3000 tree record limit.

Crown ratio as a proxy for vigor - Benjamin W. Protzman (Virginia Tech). This talk explores stand level crown ratio, an easily measured tree attribute as a proxy for average stand vigor in growth projections in a stand-level basal area projection model developed by the FMRC.

12:00 – 1:00 Lunch (Hosted)

Greg Johnson (David Marshall/Aaron Weiskittel). A project to build a variant-free version of FVS for the Continental United States.

We have begun exploration to grow any tree list from plots anywhere in the CONUS using a single, variant-free and site index - independent model with unbiased and precise predictions. We will discuss our guiding principles, challenges, and early results.

1:00 – 3:00 Remote Sensing and Growth Model Integration (30m Each)

Integrating remote sensing based EFI with carbon growth modeling - Mike Kieser (Tessera) In this presentation, we describe how Tesera's High Resolution Inventory Solutions (HRIS) can be used to generate two critical data outputs: an Enhanced Forest Inventory (EFI) and detailed individual tree lists as the primary input for the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS). We provide a description of the stand attributes that we can model and predict, and we discuss the accuracy of such an approach. We demonstrate our approach through a case-study in a mixed-woods forest of Northern Ontario.

MicroFVS: A new REST API for the Forest Vegetation Simulator - David Diaz (Vibrant Planet) A new REST API is under development to enable scalable and consistent access to containerized versions of FVS running on cloud infrastructure for key use cases including inventory compilation and forward simulation. After reviewing the motivation for this new API, a live demonstration of MicroFVS will be offered, followed by a review of the intended applications, including providing improved defaults for FVS growth and mortality based on FIA repeated measurements. The presentation will conclude by placing this API in the context of supporting a transition towards community-developed versions of FVS.

Evaluating FVS calibrations for predicting biomass accumulation across Oregon - Daniel Swann (USFS) This study evaluates the effect of commonly applied FVS calibration techniques on FVS’ predicted live tree biomass net change. We compared “grow-only” FVS predictions of net change with and without calibration to estimates of net change derived from 10-year remeasurements on undisturbed FIA plots and to 80-year predictions of undisturbed net change derived from a stand-level growth and yield model.

TreeMap updates and quantifying wildfire risk to forest carbon - Rachel Houtman (USFS) Rachel and the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab have been busy with updates to TreeMap. Rachel will review the steps taken to improve the FIA plot-to-pixel imputations, including updated tree species predictions. She will also present methods and results from a nearly two decade long project to quantify national-scale wildfire risk and carbon.

3:00 – 4:00 Panel Discussion - The challenges with remote sensing augmented growth predictions

GMUG 2026 engages luminaries of growth modeling and trailblazers of inventory modeling to discuss the past, present, and future of growth modeling. Invited participants include:

Rachel Houtman (USFS)
David Diaz (Vibrant Planet)
Greg Johnson (GJ Biometrics, LLC)
David Marshall (Biometrician Emeritus)
Aaron Weiskittel (U of Maine)
Bruce Ripley (U of Idaho)
Piotr Tompalski (Natural Resources Canada)