Speakers SmartForest 2026
SmartForest 2026 will take place on the Technical University of Munich’s campus in Freising, at the Zentrum Wald-Forst-Holz Weihenstephan, on 12 and 13 March 2026.
You can find the SmartForest 2026 Call for Contributions here.
More information about the conference programme is available here.
Keynote Speakers
Speakers
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Thomas Breunig
Freiburg Forestry Directorate
Presentation: „Kein technischer Wandel ohne sozialen Wandel. Warum Transformation nur gelingt, wenn wir die Menschen mitnehmen“
SPeaker bio
Thomas Breunig is a forester at the Freiburg Forestry Directorate.
He is part of the forestry team there and is the technical representative of the
Baden-Württemberg State Forestry Administration in the WWW 4.0 project.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Günther Bronner
Managing Director, Umweltdata GmbH
Presentation: „Digitaler Wald. Analoges Denken. Schluss mit den Kästchen!“
SPeaker bio
After studying forestry at BOKU Vienna, Günther worked for the Austrian Federal Forestry Office in the Department of Forest Management and Silviculture until 2000. There, he was responsible for the assessment of approximately 40,000 hectares, carried out boundary surveys, and headed the division for GIS and remote sensing since 1990. From 1995 onwards, he helped to establish international consulting and integrated GNSS applications into forestry processes at an early stage.
Since 2001, he has been managing director of Umweltdata GmbH, which specialises in sustainable monitoring, mapping, modelling and management solutions. Its main areas of focus include forest inventories, GIS services, and the use of modern technologies such as airborne laser scanning, terrestrial laser scanning, and SmartForestTools. He has led numerous R&D projects, including five as consortium leader.
He regularly speaks at international conferences, including SilviLaser and ForestSAT, and cooperates with leading partners from industry and research.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Stefano Puliti
Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO)
Presentation: „Rethinking Forest ecosystem understanding and management with 3D Artificial Intelligence“
SPeaker bio
Stefano Puliti is a researcher specialising in forest remote sensing and artificial intelligence, with a focus on advancing 3D computer vision for forest monitoring and management.
His work bridges cutting-edge AI methods and forest science, aiming to enable accurate, scalable, and automated forest analysis from terrestrial, aerial, and satellite data. Stefano has been instrumental in developing a new generation of deep learning models for 3D forest understanding, including ForestFormer3D, ForAInet, SegmentAnyTree, FOR-instance, and FOR-species, which push the boundaries of object detection, segmentation, and species classification in complex forest environments.
His research contributes to improving how forests are mapped, measured, and modelled, supporting sustainable forest management and climate change mitigation. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, Stefano continues to explore how AI can unlock new insights into forest structure, function, and dynamics.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Thorsten Reitz
wetransform GmbH, Darmstadt
Presentation: „The State of the Digital Ecosystem“
SPEAKER BIO
Thorsten Reitz is the founder of wetransform GmbH.
After studying media informatics, he worked at Fraunhofer IGD from 2004 to 2012 as a research assistant and later as head of department, where he played a key role in data harmonisation projects such as HUMBOLDT, eSDI- NET+, CityServer3D and urbanAPI. Through this work, he gained broad knowledge of INSPIRE and other geodata standards. He is also the “father” and first developer of hale»studio.
From 2012 to 2015, he was Head of Product Engineering at the Esri R&D Centre Zurich, where he was responsible for the implementation of products such as ArcGIS for 3D Cities, ArcGIS Scene Services and CityEngine, as well as HR and other cross-divisional tasks.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
PD Dr. Tobias Schlechtriemen
Institute of Sociology, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg
Presentation: „Kein technischer Wandel ohne sozialen Wandel. Warum Transformation nur gelingt, wenn wir die Menschen mitnehmen“
SPeaker bio
PD Dr Tobias Schlechtriemen is a lecturer at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Freiburg.
His research focuses on topics such as the social debate around Artificial Intelligence, sustainability research and the study of transformation processes.
Since 2024, he has been leading the research project ‘Wissen über den Wald im Wandel (WWW 4.0)’, in which the Department of Computer Science at the University of Freiburg, the Freiburg Forestry Directorate, and the Forest Research Institute BW are involved.
SPEAKER
Stephan Philipp
Vorarlberg Provincial Government
Presentation: „Investieren wie ein Förster: Wie wir mit Finanzmetaphern den Wald besser erklären“
Speaker Bio
Stephan Philipp studied forestry at the Technical University of Munich and Seoul National University. In addition to completing his traineeship in Bavaria and working for several years as project manager of the Mountain Forest Initiative in the districts of Miesbach and Bad Tölz, he also passed the state examination for senior forestry service in Austria, where he now works as deputy state forestry director in Vorarlberg.
His extensive experience in forest management, which he has also discussed in television interviews and radio broadcasts, has also helped him in his second great passion: investing on stock markets around the world. He has also appeared on a well-known YouTube programme to discuss this topic.
With his book “Investing like a forester – what you can learn from the forest for the stock market” he attempts to convey the importance of sustainable forest management to people in an original way.