Forestry & Ecosystem Management

Forest Management Systems
Sanborn has been actively developing GIS applications to support the operational forestry industry for over 10 years. These applications satisfy a range of requirements including strategic planning, tactical planning, database development and maintenance, forest economics, timber lands investment, timber sales and operational activity tracking.

Enterprise-Wide Solutions
The requirements of an Enterprise forest management system based on distributed offices and operations are complex. An enterprise system requires an integrated spatial and tabular database architecture that accommodates the definition of spatial business rules for geo-processing activities, such as forest inventory editing and maintenance, and activity tracking.

Issues such as integrated database design, ArcSDE and GeoDatabase implementation, application development within the ArcMap framework, and database replication and deployment to distributed regional offices, must all be addressed to achieve a successful implementation.

Sanborn has been actively involved in designing and developing ArcGIS based enterprise wide systems for a range of clients over the past several years. Typically, distributed access to FMS applications is required using either a centralized database model deployed in a single office, or in many offices across an operational area. By applying industry standard Windows Terminal Server and CITRIX technologies, Sanborn has successfully designed, built and deployed distributed enterprise wide forest management systems using ESRI's ArcGIS platform.

Leveraging Technical Achievements
At Sanborn, we believe that no single generic forest management system can satisfy the needs of foresters across the varied landscapes and regulations found within the forestry industry. We prefer to offer custom solutions that tightly integrate a suite of core FMS applications using industry standard platforms to meet the specific needs of our clients.

The development of an enterprise FMS must be bundled with a sound understanding of user needs, data requirements and information products. The FMS offerings described below are presented as starting toolkits for building a custom FMS that meets the specific operational and functional needs of the client. This approach allows us to leverage previous achievements and technical developments for each and every client, as well as incorporate on-going advancements in commercial GIS platforms.

Sanborn's FMS suite is comprised of core modules supplemented by custom plug in modules. Modules are customized based on client's specific requirements focusing on integrating the GeoDatabase model to meet information needs.

Forest Inventory Maintenance
Maintaining an accurate and up to date spatial forest inventory database is the cornerstone of a successful forest management system. Inventory maintenance tools must address integrated spatial and tabular data requirements while adhering to a standard data model that respects business rules and relationships among different layers and features. Sanborn has developed a suite of tools to aid the operational forester in editing and updating ownership blocks, forest stands and their attributes. Built on the core ArcMap Editing tools, we have developed a spatial rules engine that supports polygon based feature relationships, as is commonly required for forest stands within ownership boundaries. These intelligent data tools guide the forester in verifying edits ensuring that the integrity of the data is not compromised.

Forest Activity Tracking
GIS software has traditionally been limited in its ability to facilitate the tracking of activities on the landscape where frequent, multi-user updates to spatial data occur and an accessible record of landscape change is required. In collaboration with our clients, Sanborn has developed a suite of tools for use within the ArcMap editing environment and ArcSDE GeoDatabases that facilitates user definition and tracking of forestry and land management activities in a temporal workflow. These tools allow operational foresters to input and track different activities that occur during the life cycle of a stand, such as site preparation, fertilizations and plantings. This module supports tracking the history of features as they proceed through the lifecycle workflow. Standards reports and maps are also provided that summarize the status of temporal activities.

Query, Reporting and Mapping Tools
The Query, Reporting and Mapping (QRM) module provides a wide range of users access to tabular and spatial query functions that facilitate the generation of standard reports and maps using predefined templates. QRM can be utilized as a standalone mapping interface, or integrated into the operational Forest Inventory Maintenance orForest Activity Tracking modules. A robust query ladder can be used to select features for any map or report. This query tool facilitates the definition of standard information outputs as well as satisfying custom and ad hoc requests.

Forest Type Mapping
Maintaining an accurate and current forest inventory database can be problematic in areas where frequent change and property acquisition often occurs. Imagery derived from aerial and satellite sensors is typically used to aid foresters in updating their available stand inventory through the use of orthoquads, image maps and conventional GIS vector database updates.

Imagery products from Sanborn provide an effective medium for updating forest maps and base map features such as roads and streams. Sanborn uses new collections and archived images to manually and automatically extract feature information for a wide variety of clients. In fact, Sanborn pioneered automated feature extraction, and is actively involved in the development of new geo-spatial mapping tools and methods. Combining our unparalleled experience in change detection and image processing techniques, Sanborn can update spatial information economically and accurately.