Development of advanced generation seed orchard designs
In situ wood quality assessment
Seed orchard’s genetic efficiency
Seed dormancy
Association genetics of biofuel attributes
Genomic selection
Awards
International Union of Forest Research Organizations Scientific Achievement Award 2010 Professor Honoris Causa – The Czech University of Life Sciences Praue 2011 Canadian Forestry Scientific Achievement Award 2017
My teaching interests are in furniture and wood products design, product development, manufacturing of secondary wood products, computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), robotic manufacturing, and wood composites.
As a member of UBC’s Educational Leadership Stream I am committed to advance and improve my teaching techniques. My goal is to continuously contribute to the development of new techniques and strategies to improve the learning experience in our undergraduate program.
My research lies at the interface between ecology and evolution, making use of the information within phylogenetic trees to bridge between them. The integration of phylogenetic approaches in ecology has been transformative, and has given rise to new sub-disciplines in biodiversity science, invasion biology, infectious disease research and community ecology. In my work, I address questions on the distribution of biodiversity and the challenges posed to its conservation.
My research strives to advance fundamental scientific knowledge on forest dynamics, which is imperative for conserving and managing contemporary forests and adapting to global environmental change. My research characterizes how natural disturbances, humans and climate interact to drive temperate forest dynamics and resilience. It has produced three key contributions:
(1) My international collaborations demonstrate widespread tree mortality in North and South America, disentangling the relative impacts of drought, insects and pathogens.
(2) Many forests in the Canadian Cordillera are increasingly susceptible to wildfire due to complex interactions among fire suppression, land-use and climatic change.
(3) My novel forest reconstructions include tree-ring methods adapted to address aboriginal cultural uses and traditional management, largely overlooked by forest managers.
My enduring partnerships with local to national governments, environmental organizations, forest management companies, community forests, and First Nations have helped me translate these scientific advances to operational conservation, restoration and management policies and practices.
Awards
Henry C. Cowles Award for Excellence in Publication , Biogeography Specialty Group, Association of American Geographers 2005 Killam Teaching Award, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia 2007 Physical Geography Professor of the Year (2009-10, 2005-6, 2003-4), Geography Students Association, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia
With extensive industry background, I am interested in both fundamental and applied research in engineered wood products (EWPs) and bamboo utilization technology (BUT). My current research areas include:
Modeling and innovative manufacturing of EWPs;
Development of engineered bamboo products for sustainable infrastructure applications;
Natural fiber composites for bio-packaging;
Improvement of veneer and strand-based composites manufacturing; and
Enhanced properties of wood and bamboo products.
Awards
Elected Fellow, International Academy of Wood Science. 2011 George Marra Award for excellence in research and writing, Society of Wood Science and Technology. 2009 L. J. Markwardt Wood Engineering Award for the most outstanding research paper in the field of wood as an engineering material, Forest Products Society, USA. 2006 Canada’s Energy Efficiency Award for development in Energy Saving Equipment and Technology. Ministry of Natural Resources of Canada/Time Canada. 2005 George Marra Award for excellence in research and writing, Society of Wood Science and Technology. USA. 2002 The 46th Wood Award for outstanding graduate research, Forest Products Society 1995 George Marra Award for excellence in research and writing, Society of Wood Science and Technology. 1994
Augmented Forests: Supplementing Forestry Field Instruction with Virtual Field Instruction and Dynamic Adaptive Quizzing to Build Skills and KnowledgePlanning April, 2017
The ability to identify indicator plant species is a critical skill for forestry students. In FRST 201 – Forest Ecology, students learn to identify 70 key plant species and the soil moisture and soil nutrient conditions that they indicate. This knowledge is requisite for subsequent courses in the forestry curriculum. The identification and characteristics of these plants is taught in the field, but dramatically increasing enrollment and language challenges (with an increasing number of ESL students) makes it more challenging for students to see, examine, and learn the plants in the field. We seek to improve student plant identification skills and knowledge by supplementing field instruction with engaging web-based resources to support student self-study of these plants and their characteristics. We will produce professional videos showing these plants and their characteristics, and we will develop a web-based, dynamic quizzing system to allow students to practice their skills and test their knowledge. These resources support significant self-study outside of field instruction.
Reducing language-related extraneous cognitive load for non-native English-speaking students in the Faculty of ForestryCurrent January, 2017
International students comprise 35% of the undergraduate student body in the Faculty of Forestry, and language issues are a serious barrier to learning for non-native English speakers. Using a Cognitive Load Theory framework, we will test various principles of multimedia learning in creating videos for a blended-learning environment to improve learning for non-native English speakers while still supporting native speakers.
My approach to teaching is learner-centered, supportive and experiential. I am inspired by the Universal Design for Learning Principles and strive to weave real-world applications into the classroom, creating a space for learning that is rooted in my students’ experiences and everyday lives.
Director, Masters for Geomatics for Environmental Management Co-director, Master of Sustainable Forest Management
Nicholas and his research team in the Integrated Remote Sensing Studio (IRSS) overall research program is focused on increasing understanding of the interaction between vegetation pigments, biochemistry and structure and how remote sensing technologies can be used to estimate properties of vegetation at a range of spatial and temporal scales. The IRSS key focus area is forestry and the application of remote sensing to conservation, management and production issues.
Key areas of interest include:
Increased awareness that high spectral resolution optical sensors, capable of detecting changes in leaf spectral properties with high temporal frequency can be used to augment a number of established approaches for modeling growth from drone, aircraft or space. His research has developed new approaches for incorporating remotely sensed data as inputs into plant physiological models, with the ultimate aim of improving models from satellite based observations. Key to this approach is estimating light-use efficiency (LUE) which is determined by the most limiting of a number of environmental stresses restraining the photochemical reaction process, such as nutrition, water, and temperature. The IRSS lab has been focused on moving from individual sites with single sensors, to more diverse sites which cover a range of species and structural stages and the deployment of more instruments across Canada. This work is also highly relevant for forestry, phenotyping and agriculture. We have designed and installed a range of near remote sensing spectro-radiometers on tower based systems to observe and monitor plant growth. Likewise the installation of cameras on UAV’s to detect changes in tree physiological behaviour.
Airborne and space-borne LiDAR technology has revolutionized the measurement of tree height and development of highly accurate digital elevation models (DEM). The application of LiDAR data to sustainable forest management continues to be a major theme of our research. With collaborators from these universities/governments/industry partners, we have demonstrated how LiDAR data can best be utilized across a range of forest types, silvicultural regimes and acquisition platforms. We have contributed to best practice guides with the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) documenting our discoveries and development of the technology, which is the most downloaded CFS information guide ever and for which we were recognized with the CFS collaboration award for 2013.
We also have a strong and productive collaboration with the remote sensing team, at the Canadian Forest Service, Pacific Forestry Centre on the development of Canada-wide land cover, disturbance and forest attribute datasets at 30m resolution for national level reporting. We develop with CFS new algorithms, approaches and analyses to examine how and where Canada’s forests are changing distributing a wide range of published, free and open datasets via the Canada Forest Information System.
My interest in linking remote sensing to forest growth has its origins as a co-developer of the 3PGS model, a simple physiological-based forest growth model that can utilize remote sensing data as an input to predict stand growth primary production. I have been further developing the model, and its underlying basis (3PG) to model growth rates, and limits to growth in the Canadian Boreal and Pacific Northwest (PNW) and mapping species distribution under current and future climate.
Lastly our work also focuses on Biodiversity and remote sensing. We work with international collaborators to define the critical aspects of biodiversity that need to be monitored in Science (Pereira al. 2015) as well as examine how remote sensing approaches can offer solutions in Nature (Skidmore et al., 2016). In addition to these reviews and opinion pieces , I have continued to develop the Dynamic Habitat Index (DHI) which I adapted and applied across Canada, Australia and globally. This index provides an integrated response of vegetation to climate using landscape greenness (fraction of photosythetically active radiation, fPAR) at monthly time steps, to assess how biomass is partitioned and made available as food and other habitat resources for fauna.
Awards
Nicholas Coops has been listed in the “Highly Cited Researcher” list for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, indicating he has authored multiple Highly Cited Papers which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field and publication year in the Web of Science over the past decade.
Canada Research Chair in Remote Sensing
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada 2022
2022 Canadian Institute of Forestry Scientific Award
