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GIS for Science
Sustainable land management
Forests cover one-third of the United States, totaling about 749 million acres that can be managed to improve wildlife habitat and purify drinking water. More than half of these woods are privately owned, mostly by families and individuals with 100 or fewer acres. These properties are often vulnerable to development and fragmentation because owners lack the information and resources to practice modern forest management and participate in ecosystem services markets. By paying landowners for the environmental services their land provides, ecosystem services markets can help protect forests and reward sustainable management.
Sustainable management requires a deep understanding of the forest. But most forest owners have little quantitative information about their land because forests are large and extremely complex. Foresters typically gather data by conducting a timber cruise, which involves surveying sample plots by foot to inventory timber and assess other ecological values, such as habitat and carbon. Timber cruises are labor-intensive and expensive, and because only a small portion of the area is surveyed, the results are often imprecise. SilviaTerra was founded with the idea that widely available forest inventory data could help people make better land management decisions. SilviaTerra migrated its datasets to the Azure cloud and
scaled its computing process from thousands of acres to hundreds of millions of acres, creating a .05-acre pixel resolution map of US forestland via state-by-state deployment. The process combines field measurements from the US Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis dataset with a stack of remotely sensed imagery. SilviaTerra’s detailed inventory system monitors the status of a forest on a small scale, significantly reducing the costs for assessing the carbon value of the forest.
SilviaTerra is also creating an application programming interface (API) on Azure that will allow landowners, foresters, and researchers to efficiently access insights from the forest inventory layer. Many forest managers today use ArcGIS as their geographic information system. ArcGIS holds forest inventory estimates for each management unit of the forest; however, these estimates are often years out of date. Normally, foresters must collect new stats in the field, which could take months. But because the Microsoft Azure API interoperates with ArcGIS, foresters can simply click a forest management unit and instantly update it with the latest information from the SilviaTerra Basemap national forest inventory.
SilviaTerra Basemap forest inventory. The gradient indicates the density of forest coverage (lighter blue indicates denser forest).
