Rubén Valbuena

I was born in 1979 in Valladolid, an industrial town in the northern plateau of Spain. During my childhood, I had less contact with nature than most of my professional colleagues. However, soon I developed full respect for all kinds of life on Earth and became concerned about the need for their conservation for our own benefit. I dreamed to be a biologist already when being still too young to realize that nature conservation would in practice mean to take active part in managing natural resources for assuring their sustainable use.

During my studies in Biology in Pamplona, I came into contact with Geographic Information Systems. It was by then clear that I wanted to use GIS professionally, since they combine some my best skills and favourite issues: studying nature, computing, and putting all these on maps. But my studies included a mere introduction to them, so I expanded my education with Environmental Sciences in Madrid. This way, biology led me to GIS; my love for statistics and GIS merged in remote sensing; and remote sensing paved the way to Lidar.

After having been an exchange student in a forestry school in Finland, I contacted a research group in Madrid which was working on forest management using airborne Lidar. At that time, it was completely unknown to me what Lidar was all about. However, I luckily happened to develop my expertise in a remote sensor that has become really popular over the years in forest inventory. I am glad that this has finally allowed me to get back to my beloved Finland, were I can finally enjoy the lushness and peace of its forests and the calmness and modesty of its people.

Metsähallitus, through the Foundation for European Forest Research, is sponsoring my project on obtaining pan-European indicators of forest structural diversity by means of Airborne Laser Scanning. My work aims at computing simple indicators of forest structure from ALS surveys, with many study areas throughout Europe, which could allow comparing and monitoring their management. These indicators are similar to those that traditionally have been used for evaluating the diversity of species in biological studies. But in this case they are used to evaluate whether diverse size classes are present in a forest, or on the contrary all trees are of equal age. This may be important to know not only if humans prefer the beauty of the landscape shown by a multi-layered forest, but also with regards to many conservational issues, such as the fact that many species require trees of different sizes at various stages of their life cycle. The project clearly reflects my combined forestry/biology/remote sensing background, with a patent trust that in Europe we can make a difference in forest conservation if working together. I am glad to be able to develop my work at the European Forest Institute, since the international vocation of this organization may help my results to become sound and applicable at global level.

Visit also my Staff page at EFI