Poster Presentation C Thursday, 5:00 – 6:00 pm C Edmund Fitzgerald Exhibit Hall

Historical Forest Record Keeping with GIS

Karen V. Walker, Thomas E. Burk
University of Minnesota
Department of Forest Resources
Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis Laboratory
115 Green Hall
1530 Cleveland Avenue North
St. Paul, MN  55108
kwalker@gis.umn.edu

Ronald W. Severs
University of Minnesota
Cloquet Forestry Center
175 University Road
Cloquet, MN  55720

The Cloquet Forestry Center is a 3,340-acre tract of land near Cloquet, Minnesota, owned by the University of Minnesota. The Center is an intensively managed forest that serves the teaching, research, and outreach needs of the University's College of Natural Resources. Paper documentation of management activities, including harvesting, planting, herbicide spraying, and research has been kept for a number of years. These documents are now being converted to an electronic format, using Microsoft Access and ESRI's ArcView. 

An Access database structure for each management activity was created and data entered. Aerial photographs from various years spanning the period of record keeping were obtained, scanned, and rectified using ArcView's Image Analyst. The location of each management activity was digitized using the photos as a backdrop. These records will compliment the GIS layers that are already maintained for the forest, including cover type, soils, roads, streams, and topography.

An application is being developed which integrates the database into ArcView. The application will allow managers to query, display, and update spatial data and attributes using any combination of year(s), activity(ies) and/or location(s). The system will also allow for efficient sharing of data among Center employees.