John Kershaw

Associate Vice President Academic (Partnerships)

Academic interests

• Forest Mensuration
• Sample Design and Analysis
• Large-Scale Forest Inventory
• Long-term Forest Monitoring
• Forest Growth and Yield
• Copulas
• LiDAR
• Close-Range Digital Photogrammetry
• Big Data
• Forest Dynamics following Partial Harvesting
• Forest History

Brief biography

John joined the faculty in 1991. Prior to moving to New Brunswick, he worked in forestry in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Washington State. John’s speciality is forest mensuration, forest inventory design and analysis, and growth and yield modeling. John has pioneered the application of copulas, a special class of multivariate distributions, in forest inventory, LiDAR analysis, and growth modeling. He currently has research projects in New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Maine, Florida, Oregon, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, and India. He is the lead author on the 5th Edition of Forest Mensuration (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), the most widely used mensuration book in North America.

John is currently the Assistant Vice President Academic (Partnerships) at UNB, but continues to have an active and growing research lab. John teaches Advanced Mensuration, Research Methods, Forestry in Atlantic Canada, and coordinates the Nanjing Forest University – UNB 3+1+1 program. John is UNB’s representative to the Indo-Canadian Shastri Institute. He enjoys world travel and forging new partnership opportunities for UNB. He is a member of the editorial board for Forest Ecosystems. When he is not being a forester or assistant VP, he is an avid hiker, canoeist, and mountain climber.

Courses taught

• Forestry in Atlantic Canada
• Research Methods
• Advanced Forest Mensuration

Selected research

Chen, Y. Kershaw, J.A., Jr., Yang, T.-R., and Hsu, Y.-H. 2020. Carbon estimation using sampling to correct and LiDAR-assisted enhanced forest inventory estimates. Forestry Chronicle. 96(1): 9-19.

Li, W., Kershaw, J.A. Jr., Costanza, K., and Taylor, A.R. 2020. Evaluating the potential of red spruce (Picea rubens Sarg.) to persist under climate change using historic provenance trials in eastern Canada. Forest Ecology and Management. 466:118139 (13p).

Gadow, K. v., Cieszewski, C., and Kershaw, J.A., Jr., and. 2019. To Act or not to Act: Białowieża Forest under Conflicting Ecological Paradigms. Proceedings of the Forestry Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. 19:163-170.

Kuehne, C., Russell, M., Weiskittel, A.R., and Kershaw, J.A., Jr. 2020. Comparing strategies for representing individual-tree secondary growth in mixed-species stands in the Acadian Forest region. Forest Ecology and Management. 459:13.

Wang, H., Kershaw, J.A. Jr., Yang, T.-R., Hsu, Y.-H., Ma, X., Chen, Y. 2020. An Integrated System for Estimating Forest Basal Area from Spherical Images. Mathematics and Computational Forestry and Natural Resource Sciences. 12:

Lin, H.-T., Lam, T.Z., von Gadow, K., Kershaw, J.A., Jr. 2020. Effects of Nested Plot Designs on Assessing Non-spatial and Spatial Forest Structures. Forest Ecology and Management. 457:8

Ayrey, E., Hayes, D., Fraver, S., Kershaw, J.A., Jr., and Weiskittel, A. 2019. Ecologically-Based Metrics for Assessing Structure in Developing Area-Based, Enhanced Forest Inventories from LiDAR. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing. 45(1): 88-112.

Yang, T.-R., Kershaw, J.A., Jr., Weiskittel, A.R., Lam, T.-Y., and McGarrigle, H.E. 2019. Influence of Sample Design and Estimation Method on Wall-to-Wall LiDAR Volume Estimates. Forestry. 92:311-323.

Chen, Y., Yang, T.-R., Hsu, Y.-H., Kershaw, J.A., Jr., and Prest, D. 2019. Application of big BAF sampling for estimating carbon on small woodlots. Forest Ecosystems.6:13.