ABSTRACT
The Bowater Corporation in Calhoun, Tennessee manages approximately 496,000 acres of timberland in the southern Appalachian region. Traditionally, the foresters have relied on ground knowledge, hard-copy records, and aerial photographs to manage this extensive land base. Bowater contracted with Pacific Meridian Resources to convert the existing hands-on land management system to a digital GIS database. In cooperation with Emerge, Pacific Meridian acquired 1-meter digital imagery of the Bowater land base. GIS technicians delineated stand boundaries with heads-up digitizing using the imagery as a backdrop. This process eliminated a major step in the data capture process: the need to digitize stands from a map derived from aerial photography. Stands were labeled as to species, origin, and thinning condition. Base map layers for transportation, hydrology, hypsography and political boundary layers were derived from USGS 1:24,000 and 1:100,000 DRG’s. A simple automated mapping tool was developed in ArcView to provide Bowater’s foresters easy access to the imagery and GIS data and to facilitate printing of stand maps. |