The Next Generation of Forestry Information Systems:
A Technological, Sociological and Economic Perspective

Jim Stikeleather

Forest Technology Group - Chief Technology Officer

The use of business information systems in Forestry have traditionally focused on the geospatial, biological and accounting aspects of managing forest resource supply for consuming markets. More demanding economic conditions and accelerating market velocity are driving a move toward a capital investment approach to managing forest land that addresses ROI questions, multiple revenue streams, outsourcing services, management and process execution, and alternative products and services. Sociological pressures are creating new value perspectives, new performance measures, and heightened regulatory requirements that must be balanced against the new economic pressures. Traditional accounting, financial and statistical biological models cannot handle the resulting complexity, the interdependency of required models, nor the rapidity of change in all dimensions while maintaining and presenting an enterprise perspective. Consequently, traditional methods of developing and applying forest information systems and GIS will not adequately meet the needs of the forest land manager or investor in the future.

This session will describe underlying technologies and approaches that can be used to build the flexible, adaptable, scalable forest land information systems that will be necessary in the future. Topics will cover service-oriented architectures, mathematical modeling, meta models, semantic models, meta data, standards, pattern recognition, grid computing, dynamic security models, ubiquitous computing and inference processing. Examples will be shown of their application in a forestry information system.