Several of our Forest Management Cloud Services clients have been asking for easier ways to manage and keep information on forestry cutting rights prior to landowners or the next forest manager receiving back the land for the next rotation. Common examples are when a forestry cutting right is transferring to the landowner or another forest manager / investor.
There is an easy way to do this within ATLAS GeoMaster and uses a little known about feature called “Planned Forests and Stands” so we thought it would be worth making more people aware of this.
Users can create and define “planned forests, compartments and stands”. Events and schedules can be defined within GIS and GeoMaster while the area in question is still being used by the previous rotation forestry right holder. This allows important events such as the harvesting and forestry right renewal dates to be recorded and next rotation budgets and schedules (crop replanting and ongoing management) to be prepared. These planned forests exhibit most of the behaviours of normal forest patch layers meaning they mimic the look and feel and management of current forests.
Figure 1 – Create a “planned forest”
Once the existing crop has been harvested and the fallow land has been returned to the landbank the landbank patches should be merged/split/reshaped to accommodate the planned stand, and the planned stand can be converted to an actual stand which is linked to and defined by the landbank patches. On conversion the planned stand is removed from the planned forest and relocated in the actual forest. All events associated with the planned stand are migrated to the landbank patches (non-crop events may be associated with predecessors of current patches, depending on event date) and maintain all their attributes i.e. JobNumber, Crew, dates etc.
Figure 2 – Convert planned stands to actual, including all planning schedules and events.
ATLAS GeoMaster is part of the Forest Management Cloud Services provision by Interpine. If you would more information on this please contact us via info@interpine.co.nz