School of Forestry

I am a forest engineer and quantitative geneticist, fascinated by variability in natural and human-made forest ecosystems. I focus my efforts on characterizing and exploiting wood variability trends, in an effort to increase site productivity and forest value. I collaborate with domestication and breeding projects, including the New Zealand Radiata Pine Breeding Programme and Drylands Forest Initiative (durable eucalypts).

My personal website contains copies of all my publications. https://luis.apiolaza.net

My primary interest is in the wellbeing of those who work in the forest and logging industries. That encompasses not just the demand and resource determinants of wellbeing within those industries but also the way in which the various identities in operation within those fields are constructed and interact to create those determinant conditions. This leads to research projects that encompass worker health outcomes,  productivity studies for logging machinery,  operator skill development and the social practices constructed by the various discourses operating within a male dominated rurally centred industry like forestry.

Dr Meike Holzenkaempfer is a Senior Technician in the University of Canterbury’s School of Forestry, supporting teaching, research, and field‑based learning across forest science, ecology, and environmental management. She provides advanced technical expertise in laboratory and field operations, sample processing, analytical workflows, and health and safety compliance, ensuring high‑quality and reliable outcomes for staff and students. Meike’s work underpins a wide range of forestry research activities, from wood science and forest ecology to environmental monitoring and applied field techniques.

Lan Le-Ngoc is a member of the CryoLab research team at the University of Canterbury.

He has 35 years of experience in theoretical and experimental research on dynamic systems, machine learning, and AI in engineering, computational mechanics, instrumentation and controls, and digital signal processing. Specific applications include ocean wave mechanics and wave energy converters, cutting processes of natural materials, dynamic behavior of continuous band cutting devices, active vibration control, machine tool dynamics, dynamic properties of wood, coupled human-machine systems, and upper limb motion and strength assessment for rehabilitation, as well as mobile robot navigation.

Commercial services include finite element stress and vibration analyses; developing simulations for dynamic systems (e.g., large motion swing dynamics, stress propagation in timber poles, ocean wave energy converters, internal ballistics for gun silencers, and hydrodynamics of jet pumps); and developing instrumentation and software for data acquisition and analysis for various experiments, including the performance of boats and propulsion systems, impact testing of timber poles, wireless systems for measuring cryogenic temperatures in rotating systems, vibration analyses of wind turbines, band saws, and circular saws, and battery-powered corers for hardwood.

He is familiar with Fortran, C/C++, LabVIEW, LabWindows CVI, Visual Basic, MATLAB, Python and its scientific packages, and Julia.

I’m interested in understanding urban trees and the critical roles they play in cities around the world. The trees that comprise urban forests face considerable abiotic and biotic stress, but help to make cities liveable, providing residents with healthy, sustainable, and desirable places to live and work. To that end, I research the growth, function, management, and ecosystem services of trees in urban environments. I also lead the ‘New Zealand Urban Forest Initiative’, which connects researchers and urban forest stakeholders, such that new research can be used to inform best practices in urban forest management in New Zealand.

I also study the spatial and temporal dynamics of New Zealand’s indigenous forests and exotic forest plantations using a range of quantitative techniques. I work extensively with remote sensing or earth observation techniques, including lidar, as well as aerial and satellite imagery. In this capacity, I'm the co-Director of the ‘Forest Observation with Remote Sensing Technologies’ FOReST research group at the School of Forestry.

I use remote sensing to understand and measure forests and the natural environment. My work integrates LiDAR, UAV and satellite imagery with machine learning to map forest types, monitor forest dynamics and land cover change, and estimate key structural and biophysical variables.

My research focuses on New Zealand’s small-scale plantation forests (woodlots), with an emphasis on mapping and inventory using remote sensing. This includes classifying tree species, estimating stand age, and deriving tree and stand-level attributes to support forest management and decision-making. I am the co-director of the Forest Observation with Remote Sensing Technologies (FOReST) research group at the University of Canterbury School of Forestry, and I welcome enquiries from motivated postgraduate students who are interested in research in this area.