Timber Mapping for Site-Specific Forest Management

The adoption of precision agriculture technologies and site-specific management has been limited in the forest industry. Geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensed imagery have been used in forest management, but at a landscape scale, typically to prescribe and schedule treatments for a diverse collection of relatively large tracts. Individual stands have traditionally been treated uniformly based on their most prevalent characteristics. Sub-stand variability has most often been studied as something for which an efficient inventory sampling strategy can compensate, not as being suggestive of a treatment regime to maximize revenue or ecological benefits. This paper develops a method to generate a site-specific database