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Objective 4 - Digitally Competent Mindset:
Jesse Abrams, Pete Bettinger, Leslie Boby, Chad Bolding, Bronson Bullock, Joe Conrad, Bruno da Silva, Stephen Kinane, Roger C. Lowe, III, Fred Maier, Krista Merry, Khaled Rasheed, Jacek Siry, Sheng-I Yang, and Dehai Zhao
Contribute to measurable national impacts through the development of educational programs for digitally-competent and capable practitioners, managers, and researchers who can pipeline into successful academic industry or government careers.
Task 4.1 Learning Communities: Design project-focused learning communities that provide opportunities for data-science/engineering undergraduates to work on forestry issues and for forestry undergraduates to learn digital technologies.
Cross-institutional graduate meetings (which several undergraduates also attended) included guest speakers from University of Maine and UGA. Guest speakers discussed their research interests, various career paths, and working in academia. Meetings were also tailored toward topics of interest to PERSEUS graduate students including "Managing your online research presence" and "The academic publishing process 101." Students were encouraged to speak freely about challenges and successes related to their involvement in PERSEUS. UGA also worked with five non-thesis Master of Forest Resource (MFR) graduate students (not funded by the project) to develop GIS databases for the southeastern U.S.
Tasks 4.2 Interns and Fellows: Provide undergraduate internships and graduate fellowships for students interested in digital forestry, recruiting, and effectively engaging students with all aspects of the research project.
Through PERSEUS, 6 undergraduate interns were employed started in 2025.
Two forestry students collected images of the bark of southern tree species to help in the training of an AI algorithm to predict tree species from cellphone-captured images.
Four other interns have worked to build the Forestry Virtual Reality (VR) Lab program. These students learned about the VR technology
purchased by the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, and upgraded the software that enables the technology to function. They organized the VR Lab and developed VR experiences for both the classroom and the Plantation Management Research Cooperative (PMRC). They have also trained others to use the equipment. The interns delivered a demonstration at the Artificial Intelligence and Other Advanced Technology Solutions for Eastern United States Forestry conference in May 2025. They are now working on the development of a digital twin using LiDAR data and Unity software.
Tasks 4.3 Curriculum Development: Develop curriculum aimed at expanding the digital awareness of students engaged in forestry via a wide selection of transdisciplinary courses corresponding to the data pipeline in Global Information
System (GIS) science, UAS and remote sensing, and data science. Develop a professional master's in digital natural resources.
An AI - Forestry graduate certificate has been developed. The certificate will be offered through the University of Georgia. The certificate program includes 13 credit hours of university coursework that includes ethics, modeling, forestry courses with AI content, and a one-credit "problems" course where students apply AI to some issue of interest to our School forest, Whitehall Forest. If approved, it will be the first graduate-level AI certificate offered by UGA.
Tasks 4.4 Online Certificate: Develop online, cross-institutional digital forestry curricula for certificates including the core digital forestry curriculum - for example, undergraduate, graduate, bridging to professional science master's degree, and professional training, workforce, development, and Extension
UGA has focused online education activities towards the Online Learning in Applied Forestry (OLAF) platform. OLAF is an online, asynchronous educational tool that provides SAF-approved Category 1 Continuing Forestry Education (CFE) credits for those people who successfully complete a course. To date, we have completed and launched the Remote Sensing course with the support of the PERSEUS project.
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