It’s all about innovation.

FP Innovations and the Canadian Institute of Forestry held an Excellence and Innovation in Operational Planning workshop at Seven Generations Education Institute in Kenora this week.

The workshop was held to showcase technology that’s out there and available for forest operations planning.

Dean Caron, an industry advisor for FP Innovations, described one of the exciting technologies that was discussed – 3D imagery.

“We’re using what are called anaglyphs, which when you view it with a set of 3D glasses you can see the forest in 3D,” Caron said. “Which is really quite useful when planning forest operations because you can zoom in, you can see all the hills, the tree heights. With some of the software that our clients are using, like Weyerhaeuser, Domtar and Resolute, you can click on the top of the tree and the bottom of the tree and it will tell you how tall it is.”

Speakers came in from Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba and around Ontario. Sixty people were in attendance.

Caron added the hope is that the workshop will be just one of many brought to the area.

“We’re trying to do a lot of work to help promote capacity building and put on different workshops of this nature,” he said. “One thing we really like is Kenora as a location. It’s very central being in the middle of the country, and there’s a deep history in forestry. We want to make Kenora a hub for these type of events and conferences.”

Kenora has had success holding similar events, including a forestry summit and the Canadian Institute of Forestry meetings in 2015 that both drew crowds of more than 100, and the International Union of Forest Research Organizations conference last year.