The Kentucky GeoBook - A Powerful Rapport Building Tool Between Forester and Landowner

L. MacSwords

Kentucky Division of Forestry

Presently the KDF creates a forest plan document at the request of a landowner in order to provide recommendations for forest management. The owner is given a paper copy of the plan. The concept for the Geobook is to provide software that will allow the Forester to create a digital book with the plan information for the landowner, as well as a digital interactive map. The Geobook will be burned to a CD-Rom. The Forest Plan Geobook author is a stand alone software tool that allows the individual forester great flexibility in the creation of a Geobook. Using a GUI interface, the forester will have a basic shell of a forest plan to work with. Using templates designed by a technical advisory group during the KLS project , he/she can add pages to the forest plan and populate them based on their specific forest plan. A group of foresters within the KY Division of Forestry reviewed the draft GeoBook designed by the KLS Project personnel and added much more material that they thought was relevant. Their additions include forests health information, forest pests and disease information, where to purchase tree seedlings, information about KDF programs, how to participate and who to contact, as well as information about tree types, and threatened and endangered species. KDF sees this product as a very powerful information transfer tool. Many landowners do not know about the programs that are available to them or about basic information about their woodlots. An added value from the GeoBooks is the KDF is being seen by their constituencies as technologically advanced.

Keywords: KY forest plan GeoBook, Kentucky landscape snapshot, Kentucky Division of Forestry

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