Digital Forestry: A White Paper

acquiring, integrating, analyzing and applying digital information to support sustainable forests.” The closely related term, “Digital Forest,” is defined as “a digital representation of forestry information.” These concepts and definitions were developed at “The 1 International Workshop on Digital Forestry,” June 13–19, 2004 in Beijing, China, which was jointly sponsored by Chinese and American forestry institutions and organizations and participating scientists, experts and officials from China, United States, Germany, Canada, and Great Britain. Although rooted in traditional forestry disciplines, Digital Forestry draws from a host of other fields that, in the past few decades, have become important for implementing the concept of forest ecosystem management and the principle of sustainable forestry. These other fields and their associated technologies include geographic information science and systems, remote sensing, digital image processing, forest biometrics, bioinformatics, statistics, forest modeling and simulation, decision support systems, forest survey and measurement, network communication, computer sciences, knowledge management, digital libraries, and global positioning systems (GPS). Digital Forestry, however, is envisioned as much more than just a suite of different technologies. It is a framework that links all facets of forestry information at local, national, and global levels through an organized digital network, making use of all the aforementioned tools and techniques (Figure 1). This systematic framework approach emphasizes novel linkages among various tools and techniques that have the potential to bind them into a powerful integrated framework, rather than focusing on questions and problems that are already being addressed within the component disciplines (Figure 1). This approach also paves the way for the integration of additional digital technologies as yet unforeseen. Specifically, Digital Forestry recognizes four basic system behaviors under its framework to facilitate the storage, abstraction, feedback, and integration of forestry information: (1) a network of data and information systems comprising an overall integrated forestry information infrastructure; (2) data and information abstracted at various scales from the local forestry department to the top centralized national or global systems to form multilevel decision-making systems; (3) intervention from higher system prompts a drill down query to the lower subsystems for relevant data exploration and research; and (4) higher subsystems depend on overall linkage and performance of the lower subsystems in which all necessary component technologies play their roles to increase overall efficiency. Creating new terms to respond to changes in knowledge, use, and practices of forestry is not surprising. “Precision Forestry” is an example of “utilizing high technology sensing and analytical tools to support site-specific, economic, environmental, and sustainable decision-making for the forestrysector”(http://www.cfr.washington. edu/research.pfc/about/index.htm). The “eForest” represents a collaborative effort between researchers and forest resource managers integrating satellite technologies into forest inventory and management (http://eforest.gis.umn.edu/). We regard both of these as different aspects of Digital Forestry.