One of the features of GeoMaster’s forest stand record system is its link to ArcMap. This gives the ability to easily visualise our forest and its related data. One feature often overlooked is the ability to select upcoming operations and quickly review them in GIS. For example look at;

  • An upcoming thinning work program where, as the supervising forester, you want to quickly review the latest aerial photography for each block in GIS, to check current mapping of NSA ensuring treatment area is sufficient.
  • Update all the recently planted area patches with a more accurate planted area overlay. Thus you would like to select them to edit but want to easily move onto the next area without having to constantly reselect stands or patches.
  • Check for all patches < 50m2 after a mapping operation to ensure there are no slivers in your dataset to allow quick viewing and editing.
  • Create maps or review stand history for a custom selection criteria of any kind.

Within ArcMap there are many ways to select features and review them. However, it can be difficult to locate or view selected features individually. GeoMaster added in its own toolbar for doing this. This toolbar in ArcMap is called “Selection” which provides tools that enable you to register a set of selected features, and navigate between them. Once a selection is registered there is no need for the features to remain selected, you can perform whatever tasks you need for each feature. The list is maintained in memory until such time as you register another selection, or you close your ArcMap session. Note that the selected features must all reside in the same layer. On passing the mouse cursor over the tools in the toolbar the message bar at the bottom of the ArcMap screen indicates the current feature position within the list.

To activate this feature open the Customize|Toolbars menu in ArcMap and enable the toolbar called Selection. The following tools will be displayed:

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So using our example above I can find a list of upcoming events using GeoMaster query tool, for example planned thinning events in 2014.

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Once I submit the query and select the option above to “select patches” I can then go above reviewing them in GeoMaster and GIS. As shown below all stands will be selected in the Forest View tree and also appear highlighted in ArcGIS as shown below.

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With the Selection Toolbar available as shown above (goto Customize|Toolbars to activate) and then select to Register the selection icon. Once this is done you can clear the selected areas (for example in GeoMaster use the toolbar icon to Unselect All). The bonus now though is the previous selection is remembered by ArcMap Selection toolbar. Just use the navigation icons on the toolbar to zoom and pan to each stand selected.

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Using the Selection toolbar you can navigate between this “remembered” query of stands. If you are editing, you can reselect the current active feature by selecting the Reselect Current Feature icon at the end of the toolbar.

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Hope you find this useful, as it is used by many of us in our daily tasks.