Forests are often managed using different silvicultural regimes as designed by the forest manager. A schedule describes a silvicultural regime which can be drawn on when scheduling forest events against certain areas of forest. A scheduled event differs from a planned event because it does not have a date applied to it. Rather, scheduled events are defined relative to the age of a crop, enabling you to apply one regime over multiple stands of various age classes. Scheduled events can also have associated assessments.
The Schedule Manager component of ATLAS GeoMaster applies specific regimes to areas of forest easily and without duplication. Schedules are grouped into classes to help with managing them in a logical structure. For example, you may want to group schedules on the basis of species and silvicultural treatment as shown below in Figure One.
Figure One: Schedule Manager View within GeoMaster
Creating a New Schedule
In the Schedule View right click the top level item Schedules to create a new Schedule Group and give an appropriate name. Right click the newly created Schedule Group to create a new Schedule. Note you can also create a copy of an existing schedule (including all events associated with it) which you can then modify.
Figure Two: Creating a New Schedule Group and Schedule
Once an empty schedule has been created you can add events to it by highlighting the schedule in the tree view then creating events via the Events menu options. The following two points should be noted when creating schedules: no areas of forest are selected when creating events in schedules and a scheduled event can either have a planned started date assigned or a date relative to the age of the crop to which it will eventually be attached (start, finish and progress dates are not available).
Figure Three: Events Attached to a Schedule
Having created a schedule you can now attach it to an area of forest. In the main Forest View of GeoMaster select the patches or stands you wish to attach the schedule to (remember if you have many stands to select use the select by query tool e.g. all radiata stands in forest x planted in 20xx). Under the Events tab select Schedule – Attach Schedule and choose the appropriate schedule. If any of the selected patches already have a schedule assigned they will be listed and the current schedule displayed. You can either cancel the operation at this point or continue and assign the new schedule to the patches. At any time the schedule of an individual or group of patches can be edited through the standard patch edit menu option (Edit/Edit Selected/Patches).
Figure Four: Applying a Schedule to a selected Stand
Scheduled events will now be shown in the Event List for the selected patches and in reports (marked with a # symbol).
Figure Five: Scheduled Events Marked with a ‘#’ in a Stand Operations Report
To implement scheduled events they are firstly converted to Planned Events. This is called Realising a Scheduled Event and can be done in two ways. The right click menu in the Event List (as shown below in figure 6) has a Realising a Scheduled Event command that converts the highlighted event to a planned event. This command is only available for events lists of a stand or patch, and the converted event will only be applied to that stand or patch.
Figure Six: Scheduled Events Marked with a ‘#’ in a Stand Operations Report
Alternatively, you can convert an event covering multiple stands. Select the stands and chose Events/Schedule/Create Event from Schedule. Select the event from the appropriate schedule and click the Create Event button. If selected crops have been planted in different years GeoMaster will create separate events for each year. Each event will have the same details as the scheduled event but the date calculated from the crop age will be different. If patches from different stands are selected then you have the option of creating a single event associated with all patches or creating separate events for each stand.
Figure Seven: Scheduled Events Marked with a ‘#’ in a Stand Operations Report
If you want more information about using ATLAS GeoMaster in the cloud services provided by Interpine, feel free to contact us via our feedback form.