In his office in MSU's forestry department, EEB core faculty member David Carter shows off an image of a virtual forest on his laptop.
It’s not just any forest. It’s a computerized replica, or “digital twin,” of a loblolly pine stand, created using lidar, the laser scanning technology that self-driving cars use to map their surroundings.
Carter says virtual landscapes like these could allow forest managers to test different management strategies in a simulation before deploying them in the real world.