1 A new perspective for forest research: R & B Cormier Inc. is taking the guessing and gruntwork out of counting trees.

Aviation and aerial photography have always been an integral part of Rob Cormier's life. Since his early days as a 19-year-old bush pilot, he's been capturing images from the air while flying hunters, fishermen and geologists into remote bush camps across Northern Ontario.

This year, his small, seven-employee Sault Ste. Marie firm, R & B Cormier Inc., is poised to make great gains with a forest inventory software system designed to take some of the guesswork and grunt work out of counting trees.

Ontario's forest sector may be in the dumper, but Cormier's company is thriving in the United States with his flagship technology, R-MAP (Remote Mapping and Photogrammery), a three-dimensional photo interpretative tool, that he is ready to take globally.

"Forest inventory is needed whether you cut or not," says Cormier, who founded his aerial photography and forest inventory consulting firm with his wife, Betty, in 1989.

Though the client list he has accumulated over the years reads like a Canadian forest industry directory, most of his recent success has come south of the border.

His sophisticated data capture software has drawn the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its agency, the U.S. Forest Service, his company's biggest clients to date.

"Our secret sauce is how we take two-dimensional individual tree crown information and make it relevant in a three-dimensional world."

His trademarked system analyzes stereo images taken by a pair of cameras housed inside specialized booms slung beneath a helicopter. Flying low over the forest canopy, within a metre, they can deliver top-quality images with pinpoint accuracy.

The technology replaces the need and the expense to drop field crews into remote areas for tree counts.

"That's why we're growing in leaps and bounds in the States," says Cormier, who also has worked in Chile, Indonesia, Russia and Finland.

Cormier says the accuracy of ground surveys can sometimes vary, depending on weather conditions and the expertise on the ground.

"And nobody wants to do this type of work anymore," says Cormier, as enrolment levels at university and college forestry programs are slumping across Canada. "Nobody coming out of these programs is interested in slogging it through the bush."

The idea for R-MAP first came about through his Canadian Forest Service connections. He adapted and modified a basic DOS-based software program developed at the nearby Great Lakes Forestry Centre.

With a federal research grant, they re-engineered the program to provide the kind of data they needed to do forest inventories.

"It has gone through so many changes," Cormier says of R-MAP, now in its seventh generation. "What is left over from the original might be four per cent. It's been completely re-tooled and re-engineered to where it has zero semblance."

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Together with his long-time business associate and fellow bush pilot, Mark Wiskeman of Thunder Bay's Wiskair, they have invested more than $2 million into R-MAP. The two are working on a system to install on drone helicopters.

Before R-MAP, Cormier used black and white aerial photography at medium scale (up to 10,000 feet above ground) for a photo interpreter to delineate species in a forest stand.

Today, he can make low-level passes to allow photo interpreters to get measurements and counts of trees, shrubs, stumps, deadfall and even blueberries, something that's of interest to the USDA and the Ontario Forest Research Institute (OFRI) when it comes to analyzing wildlife habitat.

The technology delivers detailed images that Cormier says rival anything a CIA spy satellite can produce.

"With this technology we can analyze and create it in a GIS-ready (geographical information system) format," he says.

Anything that can be recorded in 3D can be accurately identified and measured for length, width and height.

"We can get down to half-millimetre pixel size with the helicopter photo. Can we count bugs? Sure."

Before R-MAP was developed, the company's international sales measured about five per cent of their total revenue.

These days, Cormier pegs it at closer to 75 per cent and forecasts his foreign clients will make up at least 90 per cent of his business for 2006 as he plans to take R-MAP abroad for the first time.

He's already fielded inquiries from Chile, Ecuador and Puerto Rico.

Though reluctant to discuss sales figures, Cormier says the company has increased their 2005 revenues "five-fold" from the previous year by doing jobs outside Canada.

He is considering setting up an office in Chile where some established clients are looking at the forest inventory needs in the southern half of that country.

Cormier is also exploring other applications for R-MAP beyond forestry, including environmental monitoring and precision agriculture, which is farming using technology to tailor soil and crop management.

www.wiskair.com

QUICK FACTS

R & B Cormier Inc.

Sault Ste. Marie

Founded: 1989

Rob Cormier, CEO 

# of Employees: 7

By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business