FORESTRY MAPPING & GIS:

Conservation & Economy:

Like many natural resource concerns, effective forestry management is never a simple story.  Forestry is a balance of ecological awareness, operational logistics, stakeholder considerations, and, all the while, ensuring the continuing productivity of renewable resources. This is why putting accurate, useful and accessible geographic information to work is so critical and Access Geographic is here to help.

Healthy & Productive Environments:

Successful forestry management is challenging. Fostering healthy and productive forestry systems is about understanding immediate conditions while recognizing the importance of broader dynamics at work in the landscape.  Harvest scheduling, seeding, watershed management, habitat monitoring and prescription burns, all these inputs run at different temporal cycles - days, years or even decades. Having a geospatial solution available where the integration of complex variables can identify changing and reciprocal dynamics in an organized and accessible format is a powerful decision-making tool. It helps identify opportunities and avoid critcal mistakes, helping provide the competitive edge necessary for responsible and cost-effective forestry management.

Acquiring Effective Geo-Information for Forestry:

Accurate and current geographic information is critical for actionable and effective decision-making.  There are powerful geospatial tools available for these purposes: LiDAR and photogrammetric methods offer various applications from canopy height monitoring to 3D terrain modeling for drainage and erosion assessments.  Aerial and satellite imaging sensors are another useful resource, offering natural and multi-spectral data for monitoring vegetation health through Color-Infrared (CIR), Thermal mapping, and other methods such as NDVI. Field surveys are also a critical means for maintaining a current perspective and can be supported through customized mobile geospatial applications. These field systems allow deployed teams to acquire new information, upload site images and share data with other team members.

Building a Strong GIS Foundation:

Accurate and current geographic information creates an effective foundation for integrating diverse types of information, realizing patterns and trends, and making smart decisions for forestry applications. Creating a GIS (Geographic Information System) environment that allows key players to access, analyze and utilitize the information to make active decisions effectively is important to effective natural resource management including soil, watershed, erosional, and drainage conditions.  This starts with understanding the problems and goals that are core to the forestry mission, then providing GIS solutions that are useful to the needs specfic to the fostery program.  This can provide a means of archiving and maintaining information while also allowing forestry team members to access historical and current data while inputing new content from the ,mobile devices in the field supported by hosting and streaming solutions, building an impressive pro-active resource, while avoiding costly management oversights and ineffecient land-use decisions.

Integrated Solutions: Organization & Awareness:

Forestry management concerns are diverse, and putting together an integrated solution that captures the big picture - providing a current and comprehensive perspective of your forestry operation - is a powerful tool. Through a customized geospatial solution, accurate information can be distributed and shared effectively leading to better decision-making, better management and ultimately a more productive operation.  Integrated solutions can mean training your team on all aspects of data acquisition (including UAV flight training!), system managment and analysis or allow our certified team to support any aspect of the solution workflow.

Forest Fire Prevention & Management:

Fire is a threat and resource in forestry management.  On either side of this spectrum, having a current visual and spatial reference for fire management response, planning and preventative management is an invaluable resource. LiDAR and satellite-aerial mapping can supply a clear and accurate baseline of conditions to serve each of these areas.  Color-Infrared (CIR) aerial mapping, in particular, can provide a strong threat intelligence resource. Well before an emergency situation strikes, CIR offers a preventative tool for risk assessment and planning. Aerial multi-spectral imaging is an effective tool for locating high risk conditions in the form of dead or unhealthy vegetation. In turn, this awareness can effeciently direct preventative management such as clearing, thinning and controlled burn practices. Moreover, it can provide property owners and local governments with a direct understanding of immediate risks and better communicate the needs for preventative actions.  This same geospatial baseline also makes for a useful emergency planning tool - helping to define ingress and exgress routes and simulating response strategies.  All together, when a forest fire actually does occur, having this situational awareness in place will assist with an effective response.  Moreover, this situational awareness can be utilized to direct emergency resources and communicate fire progression and threats in real-time.  In some instances, thermal mapping can become a useful tool for locating and monitoring hot-spots.

Landscape Management & Visualization:

Forestry managment often plays a critical role in the broader landscape, impacting various stakeholder interests such as recreation, viewsheds, wilderness preservation, local identity and cultural history.  With this is mind, the significance of forestry management practices extends well beyond the immediate operational area.  This diverse 'multi-use' environment creates a strong need for clear communication.  Along this line, there are powerful geospatial visualization tools available including 3D landscape fly-throughs, viewshed line-of-sight models and even (VR) virtual reality immersion that can provide diverse stakeholder a sense of how management decisions will impact a landscape, including harvest practices and infrastructure installation such as cell towers, wind turbines and powerline coordidors.

Urban Forestry & GIS:

While harvest yield isn't typically the core goal of urban forestry, its mission is still value driven. Maintaining the intrinsic value of trees and vegetation within the context of an urban landscape incorporates many of the same principles of traditional forestry.  Urban foresters are continuously tasked with maintaining the health of their tree inventory, but also understand how it is impacting surrounding infrastructure including underground pipelines, powerlines, and other utility features.  In this way, a well-built GIS system along with mobile hand-held field units can play a powerful roll in supporting urban forestry programs.  GIS not only creates the ability to document and manage urban forestry workflows, but can also share this information with other key municipal agencies, such as public works and utility departments.  Through open communication of current information, problems are addressed promptly and avoided completely through preventive management.

Contact Us:

Access Geographic appreciates the important role forestry plays from small-scale REITs to National Forests. We have many tools and resources available to acquire, manage, and analyze data that help forestry managers make educated, effective decisions.  Please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions, we recognize the challenges in forestry managment, and we have the geospatial resources that can help.