Standing in an area of mature trees, it is often difficult to see the big picture and a remote perspective is usually what is needed to build an accurate inventory of timber resources. For a one-man forestry operation in the southeast US, finding the time and money to implement a traditional GIS and remote sensing solution is not an option. He needs a tool that will offer easy access to aerial imagery, that will allow him to display data collected on his GPS receiver, and that will include tools for measuring and creating a spatial archive of forest stands.
Solution:
XMap 5.0 GIS Editor is a GIS solution that is both affordable and easy-to-use, and it offers a wide variety of mapping tools for forestry applications. The forester visits the local county’s online GIS data library and downloads an aerial image in MrSID format that covers several prospective high-yield forest stands. This image is displayed in a second map window next to a vector base map. Mature forest stands are easily identified and traced to create an Openspace GIS layer. The area of each polygon is automatically generated and additional fields of data pertaining to each stand are added manually. Using XMap 5.0 GIS Editor, a GIS can be created within a short time, improving the efficiency of the timber management process.
Built With:
XMap 5.0 GIS Editor
BaseMap:
XMap USA Topographic Data High-resolution aerial imagery in MrSID format
User Additions:
Openspace GIS layer created by tracing timber stands
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