Harvesting markups is a regular task carried out by most forest managers. This can be: an eyeball assessment sketched on a map, walking the boundary with a GPS, using offset waypoints with a GPS and rangefinder, or using an aerial flyover and photographs. Doing this on a regular basis is a means of reconciliation of predicted vs. actual yield per hectare, is often linked with progress payments, contractor performance, and provides forward planning for forest managers.
One of the benefits of the GeoMaster Harvest Manager Module is the ability to simplify the recording and reconciliation reporting on harvest cutover progress over time. With a few mouse clicks the harvest supervisor with very little GIS editing skill can update cutover progress on a regular basis. This combined with cloud access to GeoMaster means this can be done at work, home, or in the field using any internet connected tablet or computer. This removes the need for a skilled GIS forester to be involved in the progress.
In this quick example we will complete a monthly estimated cutover markup, just to show how easy it is.
Monthly Estimated Harvest Cutover Progress
- Once in ArcGIS and connected to GeoMaster, you select ATLAS>Harvest Area Designer
- Select the harvest area you wish to update.
- Select the “Prepare Cutover Layer for Editing” toolbar button.
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Enter a cutover date “31/7/2013” and select mapping mode as estimate (to indicate it is just a rough visual assessment, compared to mapped with photography or GPS).
- Select the sketch tool and draw a polygon around the harvest area completed to date (clicking to create a line between points and double click to complete area)
- Select Save and GeoMaster will clip your “rough polygon shape” to the stand boundary including removing all non stocked gaps, reporting on the resulting stocked area harvested.
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You can now see in the progress tab of the Harvest Area showing the progress to date, also split by stand automatically by the underlying forest layers. In this case 0.7ha from Stand 57/1B, 11.4ha from 57/1A and 0.1ha from 58/1.
Points of Interest:
- Cutover recorded over unstocked patches (Landbank or non-productive) is clipped away automatically.
- When mapping Cutover you can either map the cutover approximately, and allow the designer to clip away those portions falling outside of setting boundaries, or you can map them more accurately and choose to retain such portions. On saving the harvest area (in the Designer) the cutover area extending beyond the harvest area into stocked areas is highlighted and you are given the option of keeping it or not. If kept then this area is assigned to a proxy setting in GeoMaster named OHA (Outside Harvest Area).
- One of the workflows supported by GeoMaster Harvest Manager which involves a harvest area having allows periodic cutover being recorded as “Estimated” until the cutover undergoes an accurate remapping (e.g. from aerial photography or GPS). The remap is then recorded as “Mapped” cutover, and this is dynamically integrated with any previous “estimated cutover” to provide a corrected cutover area to date.
What about Yield Reconciliation from this Cutover Markup?
By using the Cutover layer to record the progressive cut of the Harvest Area, GeoMaster actively tracks how much area was cut from underlying forest stands within the harvest setting. This information is fed into GeoMaster which dynamically reduces the reported stocked area of stands by the area cut. This then allows the yield reconciliation of each of these forest stands to actual harvested yield to date. I hope to cover this in more detail in a later post.
Hopefully this helps explain just how easy it is to use GeoMaster as an active operational tool. Prior to Interpine’s cloud deployment these simple and proven tools were out of reach for most small to medium forest managers, meaning they got by with more manual time-consuming methods.
If you want more information about GeoMaster Harvest Manager provided by the cloud services at Interpine feel free to contact us.