That, in overly simple terms, is the sophisticated nature of forestry practice and forest management in NB today.The following post originally appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of Northwest Woodlands. (PSP) and the STAMAN6 computer program. We use ArcMap GIS software to develop our maps, data recorders for accurate field recording, monument our plots/samples. Our timber cruising services provide accurate results for forest management planning, estate valuations, timber sale values, timber account values, asset basis establishment and other uses. Timber Inventories and Valuations.Convert Excel Spreadsheet to HTML is a batch html converter that Convert Excel Spreadsheet to HTML. In many cases, private landowners now have access to tools that are just as powerful (and sometimes more so!) as those used by large institutional landowners.Timber cruise template for mac free timber cruise spreadsheet. From satellites and drones to smartphones and cloud computing, new technology is empowering landowners to monitor and manage their properties like never before. Tracking the Timber Tickets and associated money is crucial to a Timber Business success.Track your loads of timber (timber tickets) and other items by job with the associated money in from mills or contractors and out to land owners, truckers, or subcontractors.The last decade has seen an incredible number of technological innovations that are transforming the way landowners relate to their forests.You can use the integrated camera to document stand conditions and some apps can even use the camera to determine tree species. The built-in GPS and compass in your smartphone can be used for mapping and for navigating to sample plot locations within your stand. These devices are packed with sensors that are especially useful for landowners. In this article, we'll cover several of the main technologies and tools that you can start using today to monitor and manage your forest.One of the biggest changes in the past few years has been the widespread adoption of smartphones.It navigates you out to each sample plot, lets you record the trees in the plot, and then sends your data back to your account on the Canopy website for reporting.SilviaTerra's Plot Hound app makes it easy to record tree measurementsYou can use Plot Hound to navigate to each of your sample plotsIf you don't already have a smartphone or tablet, we'd recommend that you get an iPad mini. Then, a community of experts helps identify your critter - for free! You're also acting as a "citizen scientist" and your species sighting information is contributed to a global biodiversity database.Get expert species identification with the iNaturalist appPlot Hound is a free timber cruising app created by SilviaTerra that runs on your smartphone or tablet. When you take a picture with the app, it records your GPS location and uploads your picture to the iNaturalist website. You can also save and export placemarks as you navigate through your property.INaturalist is a project of the California Academy of Sciences that helps you identify plant and animal species in your forest. You can load in your own georeferenced PDFs and geotiffs, or purchase data layers from their in-app store. Here are a few of the apps that can turn your smartphone (and your grandchild!) into a forest data collection machine:Avenza Maps is a very popular free mapping app for iOS, Android, and Microsoft mobile devices.
Timber Cruise Software Software To DevelopYour smartphone's built-in GPS can usually get you down to about 30 feet of accuracy, but an external GPS can get down to 5-10 feet, even under tree canopy. We've had good luck with external battery extenders like the Jackery Bolt, but you can even buy cases for your phone that have built-in battery extenders.External Bluetooth GPS - If you need high accuracy GPS measurements, you should look into getting an external bluetooth GPS. Luckily, there are a ton of battery extender solutions. Most forestry apps can work offline, so you don't need to worry about buying a data plan or having a signal out in the woods.Battery Extender - If your phone's screen is set to maximum brightness and the GPS is running all the time, your phone battery probably isn't going to make it through the whole day. Imagery can also be valuable for operational planning as you map out potential skidder paths and landing sites.If you want to go beyond the capabilities of Google Earth, you can actually get access to most of the underlying imagery for free. This will significantly reduce your cost of obtaining a forest inventory by reducing the amount of variability within each stand. One big win you can achieve with imagery is to redelineate your stand bounds to make sure that similar forest types are grouped together. In Google Earth, you can even drag a timeline slider back and forth to view historic imagery of your property going back decades.This is a great way to tell a story about how your forests have developed over time and to share your forest management decision-making process with a new generation.You can also use remotely-sensed imagery to inform your forest management decisions. We've had good success with the Dual X150 GPS - and it's only $82 on Amazon.Popular free tools like Google Maps and Google Earth are empowering landowners to visualize their properties easily and instantly. If you're feeling adventurous, you can find tutorials online for how to decompress NAIP imagery and view it.A grayscale 1-meter resolution image from the National Agricultural Imagery ProgramAnd no discussion of imagery would be complete without a mention of drone technology. The NAIP imagery is packaged at the county level and is compressed with the not-particularly-user-friendly MrSID format. If you want higher-resolution imagery, you can check out the US Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) which has 1 meter resolution imagery that is often less than 3 years old. However, the Landsat imagery is only available at 30 meter resolution. You can search for and download these images for free from the USGS "Earth Explorer" website at. Remote access network for macThere are new companies like Planet Labs that are operating massive fleets of hundreds of tiny "microsatellites" that are taking pictures of every place in the US nearly every day. While they're certainly fun and the images are beautiful, in our experience at SilviaTerra, we have yet to see anyone making forest management decisions based off of drone imagery that they couldn't have made with less time, expense, and hassle using a satellite or NAIP image.The world of satellite imaging is currently being shaken up by the emergence of several other new imagery platforms. Federal regulations are now permitting more and more drone flights, so many landowners are wondering if it makes sense to purchase a drone for their own use. This drone can be operated from an iPad and the software has taken much of the complexity out of stitching drone imagery together. The DJI Phantom 4 now retails for $999. This is a "heatmap" of timber volume across a property.Once you've collected all of these field measurements and acquired imagery of your property, how do you begin to analyze it? This is generally a job for a piece of software called a "Geographic Information System" or GIS for short. Stay tuned!Remote sensing can help "fill in the gaps" between your sample plots. In the near future, we'll be rolling out a nationwide forest inventory "data layer" that landowners can access to get an instant forest inventory. By pairing field measurements with the freely available satellite and aerial imagery we've discussed in this article, CruiseBoost "fills in the gaps" between your sample plots and enables you to get a more accurate forest inventory with fewer plots. Several regional consulting firms are now using SilviaTerra's CruiseBoost service to lower the cost of conducting a forest inventory. These new microsatellite vendors offer a simple and low-cost way to get recent, high resolution images of your property.But there are many steps between getting an image of your property and having a statistically sound forest inventory. In this screenshot, we see stand boundaries overlaid on a free digital elevation map (DEM) from the USDA.A final piece of the technological puzzle is the emergence of fully-featured web applications in "the cloud." Most of us have used web apps like Facebook or Gmail that allow you to check your messages from any device with an internet connection. The site is a great place to start.The free QGIS software can help you perform advanced geospatial mapping and analysis. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials online for how to do advanced geospatial analysis of your property using QGIS. Export your stand boundaries in a "shapefile" that you can share with consulting foresters, loggers, etc.And that's just scratching the surface. Draw a boundary around each of your stands
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