Howard Butler - Hobu Inc.
In this episode of The Digital Forester, Howard Butler, President of Hobu Inc., shares his journey from agricultural roots to leading innovation in open-source geospatial software. We explore the evolution of tools like GDAL, PDAL, and Entwine, and how they're transforming forestry, especially in handling and visualizing massive point cloud datasets.Howard explains how technologies like SilviMetric are modernizing forestry analytics and data management. He also shares thoughts on the future of lidar, cloud-optimized formats, AI, and what’s next for scalable, open geospatial systems. A must-listen for digital foresters and GIS professionals.Topics Covered:Howard’s path from agriculture to GIS and open-source softwareFounding of Hobu Inc. and the philosophy behind open sourceKey projects: GDAL, PROJ, PDAL, Entwine, and Cloud Optimized Point CloudsHow PDAL emerged with support from the U.S. Army Corps of EngineersForestry applications: point cloud processing, classification, and raster generationSilviMetric: developed with the U.S. Forest Service for forestry metric analysisThe role of cloud-native formats and scalable data accessAdoption across governments, research, and industryAI, Gaussian splatting, and the future of 3D geospatial analysisAdvice for getting started with geospatial tools