The upcoming presentation features research conducted by James Ball, whose doctoral studies were overseen by David Coomes, a Professor specializing in Forest Ecology and Conservation and serving as Director of the Conservation Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. David's expertise lies in utilising airborne lidar data to explore growth, disturbance, and phenology within tropical forests. This research was made possible through close collaboration with scientists in Montpellier and French Guiana.

Ning Ye is a postdoctoral researcher in Forestry at the University of Canterbury. She obtained a BSc degree in Geographical Information System from Wuhan University and an MSc degree in Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation from the University of Twente. For her PhD at the School of Forestry, her research focused on classifying New Zealand's native forests using optical satellite imagery. This research enabled accurate classification of the highly diverse native vegetation in New Zealand at a finer scale and at a lower cost. Currently, she is working on an NZDFI project that aims to use drone LiDAR data to generate a New Zealand-specific Eucalyptus biomass model.

Forest engineer and PhD in Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing with more than 20 years of academic and consultancy experience. My expertise areas are: quantitative remote sensing, field and laboratory spectroscopy, time series analysis, GIS, and environmental impact assessment. In the last years, I have focused my research in the use of remote sensing techniques for assessing and monitoring vegetation with especial emphasis in phenological reconstruction and anomaly detection. Currently, I am Profesor Adjunto, Secretario Académico and chief of the Lab. of Geo-information and Remote Sensing at the Geography Institute of the P. Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile.

Michele Dalponte is currently a Researcher at the Forest Ecology Unit at the Edmund Mach Foundation (Italy). His research activity is in the area of remote sensing applied to forestry and ecology, in particular the analysis of forest areas using hyperspectral, multispectral, SAR and lidar data. His most recent works are focused on forest disturbances such as forest windthrows and bark beetles outbreaks. He is author or co-author of more than 75 journal papers, and he is referee for many remote sensing journals.