https://www.royal.uk/crown-dependencies

City starting to look quite different.

The Canadian government established Petro-Canada as a state owned Crown Corporation to manage oil resources in the country. This decision was aided by a variety of international pressures, mainly the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) embargo in which the oil rich Middle Eastern countries prohibited the sale of oil to the U.S., Canada, U.K., Netherlands, and Japan due to U.S. support of Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. This oil embargo sparked a world shortage which spiked prices and caused Canada to look at moving towards more domestic sources of oil independence. With a new government, under the leadership of Trudeau, they adopted a more nationalist focus to their energy independence emphasizing the importance of Canadian industry. The Canadian government looked to reduce the influence of U.S. multinational oil companies in their own abundant oil fields in Alberta. Additionally, as a Crown Corporation, Petro-Canada was tasked to perform many tasks that wouldn’t be expected of privately owned companies. For example, the Canadian Government expected that Petro-Canada would explore the frontier for various, harder to access, resources like tar sands, heavy oil, or areas that would be difficult to develop transport chains. This charge from the state made it so Petro-Canada was more invested than private companies in exploring difficult to reach areas like the Mackenzie Delta in the mid 1970’s. The duties of the Crown Corporation were beyond simply providing energy for the nation, but also ensuring a sustainable future of energy independence.

Annotation drawn from Fossum, John Erik. Oil, the State, and Federalism: The Rise and Demise of Petro-Canada as a Statist Impulse. Vol. 2. University of Toronto Press, 1997.

This difficulty in comparing algorithms (due to differences in forest type, location, and assessment strategy used for different algorithms) indicates a clear need for set of open data and centralized assessment to allow different methods to be competed against one another to determine the best routes forward.

This kind of approach has been very successful in other image analysis problems (e.g., ImageNET).

The National Ecological Observatory Network data seems ideal for doing something like this. Data is/will be available for a variety of different systems and with LiDAR, Hyperspectral, RGB, and field data for large numbers of plots.

This difficulty of applying across forest types is central to the challenges of developing approaches that can be applied to continental scale data collection like that being conducted by NEON. Overcoming this challenge will likely require incorporating ecological information into models, not just the remote sensing, and determining how to choose and adjust different approaches to get the best delineations possible based on information about the forest type/location.

This kind of data is available for NEON plots and so these methods could potentially be well leveraged with NEON data. This would be particularly true if the NEON plot data could be used to develop a spatial model for these features that could be used to predict their values across space.

Only a small fraction of studies combine LiDAR and Hyperspectral data for the crown delineation phase of analysis.

Excellent point about the importance of integrating all available data to make the best possible crown delineations. In the case of the National Ecological Observatory Network Airborne Observation Platform methods that leverage the LiDAR, hyperspectral, and high-resolution RGB photographic data should have the potential to outperform methods that ignore components of this data.

An important call for standardized reference data and assessment for moving individual tree crown delineation forward.