Nigel Catchlove – Wood Central

Gottstein Trust Calls for Donors as it Celebrates 55 Years of Impact

Nigel Catchlove — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 06:45:10 +0000

Growing timber is one part of the forestry industry, but growing foresters is an equally important part. Suzette Weeding, Chair of the Gottstein Trust, is appealing to companies and individuals to financially support the Trust’s work in nurturing and expanding the knowledge base among foresters.

“We reached a tally of 175 people doing a Gottstein course in the past six years, with high satisfaction ratings from both seasoned and newer industry entrants, and university students”, according to Suzette Wedding. “In addition to the Wood Science Course, the Skills Development Grants and the Trust Fellowships, the Trust also funded attendance by six early career engineers to attend the World Conference on Timber Engineering in Brisbane.

“It is the genuine loyalty of industry donors that underpins this unique national educational trust fund, which will soon be entering its 55th year of operation.”

“Many leading companies are recognised as donors, with company logos placed on our course programs and also on the website”, Weddnng said.

Fellowship reports are public documents that can be read at any time and the final word is best left to one of the Skills Development Grant recipients: “The grant has allowed me to conduct field trips across NSW, ACT, Tasmania and Victoria gathering information, and seeds, to develop a set of procedures for managing seed collections, storage and linking of information needed to restore hardwood forests in the event of future fires.” Joel Dawson Forestry Corporation of NSW.

For more information about how the industry can support the Trust, visit the Gottstein Trust donors page.

Putting Seeds to Good Use: Gottstein Grant Builds NSW’s Seedbank

Nigel Catchlove — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:58:41 +0000

A tree starts with a seed … and a well-managed forest starts with a seed database and correctly identified, recorded and stored seed collections.

Meet Joel Dawson, who works for Forestry Corporation of NSW, who is using his Gottstein Trust Skills Development Grant, awarded in late 2024, to develop a seed database for NSW state hardwood forests, which will be able to be accessed by land managers and forestry agencies to help manage at-risk eucalypt species.

“While other land managers have some of this information in databases already, our current dataset at forestry in NSW is in spread sheet format and is need of updating to a relational database”, said Joel. “We should be able to bring together more data such as spatial information and germination rates for specific environmental conditions.”

It’s an important platform for the future, with clear benefits that Joel highlighted, “This accessible database will help with restoration of forests after bushfires or other disruptions.”

“The grant has allowed me to conduct field trips across NSW, ACT, Tasmania and Victoria gathering information, and seeds, to develop a set of procedures for managing seed collections, storage and linking of information needed to restore hardwood forests.”

Wood Central’s Jason Ross, a 2023 Gottstein fellow, spoke to Helen Murray at Timber Construct 2025 in Melbourne. Details of the three types of Gottstein grants, which all close for applications at midnight Monday, 27th October 2025
can be found here.

He’d found out about the Gottstein Trust Skills Development Grant through a colleague and encourages others to apply, something they must do before this year’s round closes in just a few days.

Based at Eden, NSW as Resources Supervisor – South, his role encompasses Batemans Bay, Tumbarumba and Eden management areas of the state hardwood forest estate. “Working in forestry and on coastal NSW is pretty special,” according to Joel

“The Gottstein Trust were great to work with in the application process. I found the application process really straightforward through the online form. If you have any idea of an area you’d like to upskill in don’t hesitate to apply, as it’s a fantastic opportunity,” he said.

How AI is Helping Foresters Map Every Single Tree in the Forest

Nigel Catchlove — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:35:12 +0000

In the 19th Century, a lumberjack would tap a tree with his axe and listen to the sound, which would indicate rot, hollowness or good health. In the 21^st Century, forest managers can remotely interrogate online data to identify individual trees in a far-off forest and monitor their health, revealing any physical damage from fire, drought or disease.

Lee Stamm, who is employed by Forestry Corporation of NSW, has recently completed a Gottstein Fellowship detailing the latest generation Geiger Mode Light Detection and Ranging ( LiDAR ) and advanced processing techniques, which allow for remote capture of data accurate enough to identify individual native species trees.

Click here to download the report

Foresters would be well versed with LiDAR which has been around about 60 years, but the far more powerful next generation of Geiger mode LiDAR made its first commercial application in 2015. This relatively new technique can detect single photons reflected from deep in the forest canopy to help build a picture of each individual tree, known as a single tree inventory. Interrogating the massive data load is only made possible through machine learning— a subset of AI that trains algorithms to learn from data and make decisions or predictions without being programmed explicitly.

The Gottstein Trust, or, by its full name the Joseph William Gottstein Memorial Trust Fund, is a national educational trust started in 1971 to encourage innovation within Australia’s renewable wood products and forestry industry. As a recipient of a Gottstein Fellowship, Stamm was able to visit organisations in Scandinavia and North America which routinely use data covering millions of hectares, detailing derived single tree points and mapping products for foresters in the form of Digital Twins. Digital Twins which mirror large and complex physical systems are well known in automotive and aerospace engineering worlds but relatively new in forestry.

Lee Stamm, Senior Resource Analyst at Forestry Corporation of NSW, utilises next-generation remote sensing tools to conduct national single-tree inventories across all forest tenures. “A centralised and continuously measured national inventory system across multiple tenures is crucial to understand long-term trends across Australia’s forest ecosystems,” the Gottstein Fellow reports. His fellowship took him to Germany, Norway, Canada and the USA to collaborate with STI practitioners, technology suppliers and academics.

Stamm’s report states that, “One use case for Digital Twins … is the ability to temporally and spatially visualise larger habitat trees that are legislated to be retained in perpetuity within NSW native forests under the Coastal Integrated Forestry Operations Approval (CIFOA) process. Within a Digital Twin, defining their existence before harvest, and monitoring their persistence during and after harvesting ensures regulatory compliance”.

For forest managers, the data within a digital twin model, segmented to single tree inventory, can also be used to identify fuel loads (and flammability) combined with past, current and predicted climate data to inform to mitigate the risk from un-managed fires.

“Being awarded the fellowship by The Gottstein Trust was a valuable opportunity to deepen my understanding of how companies and researchers worldwide are measuring forests”, said Stamm.

“I gained insights into the technologies available to help land managers work more efficiently and safely. This knowledge enables me to contribute meaningfully to shaping strategic research priorities for the forest industry and land management agencies,” he went on to say.

Please note: Applications are open for the 2025 round of Gottstein Trust fellowships. Scholarships and Skills Development Grants until midnight Monday, 27 October 2025