Tom Swinfield

Tom Swinfield
tws36@cam.ac.uk thomas.swinfield@rspb.org.uk

I work on tropical forest restoration based jointly between the University of Cambridge – Wolfson College – and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. I use a variety of remote sensing techniques from structure from motion, LiDAR and multi-temporal satellite observations to assess forest condition and how it responds to external pressures. Much of my recent work has involved developing metrics that describe 3D habitat structure from LiDAR data and testing these for a variety of taxa with researchers from the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology (DICE) and the Queen Mary University of London. I am interested in using experimental approaches to assess the efficacy of management interventions to improve forest restoration and currently working with partners within the centre to develop the use of unmanned aerial vehicles and computer vision as a low-cost tool for forest quality assessments. 
Recent Publications:
Occurrence of blood‐feeding terrestrial leeches (Haemadipsidae) in a degraded forest ecosystem and their potential as ecological indicators
https://doi.org/10.1111/btp.12686
Accurate Measurement of Tropical Forest Canopy Heights and Aboveground Carbon Using Structure From Motion
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11080928