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 software
• Founding of Hobu Inc. and the philosophy behind open source
• Key projects: GDAL, PROJ, PDAL, Entwine, and Cloud Optimized Point Clouds
• How PDAL emerged with support from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
• Forestry applications: point cloud processing, classification, and raster generation
• SilviMetric: developed with the U.S. Forest Service for forestry metric analysis
• The role of cloud-native formats and scalable data access
• Adoption across governments, research, and industry
• AI, Gaussian splatting, and the future of 3D geospatial analysis
• Advice for getting started with geospatial tools