If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the harvest schedule maps created by Canadian forestry giant JD Irving, Limited (JDI), speak volumes.

Based in the port city of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, JDI's Woodlands Division is responsible for managing 2.4 million acres (approximately one million hectares) of publicly owned land--so-called Crown Lands--on Canada's east coast, plus the company's own 3.9 million acres (1.6 million hectares) of timberland in New Brunswick and in neighboring Nova Scotia and the State of Maine.

Part of the company's responsibility as Crown Land Licensees includes preparation of long-term forest management plans. These plans specify harvest schedules, plus other activities such as stream crossings, road building, and silviculture, and are submitted to the provincial Department of Natural Resources for approval every five years. They also form the basis of annual operating plans.

Strategic Planning

JDI took a novel approach to the formulation of the 2002 Crown Management plans, making the most of the local knowledge of foresters in JDI's 11 district offices while leveraging the expertise of the centralized GIS department at its Saint John headquarters.

To start, JDI forester David Young and his team devised a strategic plan with the help of Remsoft Inc., the Fredericton, New Brunswick, software company that specializes in integrated resource planning and forest management and wildland fire management. Using Woodstock, Remsoft's forest-modeling software, a plan-essentially a detailed harvest schedule-was developed that harmonized the government's nonspatial objectives (i.e., biodiversity targets, minimum acreage set aside for public recreational sites, etc.) with JDI's nonspatial objectives (e.g., hardwood and softwood volumes).

The forest inventory is kept current thanks to regular updates from the district offices. "We start with a base forest derived from true aerial photography," says Young, "and update it daily to ensure all harvest, silviculture, and other forestry-related activities that affect wood supply are accounted for in the model. We employ ArcInfo to govern this process."

Making the Plans Spatial

Once the strategic plan was set, the next step was to make the plan spatial, identifying precisely where harvesting would take place and when it would occur, specifying where wildlife habitats and public recreational sites would be, and showing other geographical information over the various planning horizons.

The spatial aspect of the planning process begins with ArcInfo, which JDI planners use to create initial blocking maps that detail roads, streams, wildlife areas, special forest zones (e.g., deeryards), and, most important, the current forest inventory (tree species, crown closures, species percentages, etc.).

Then, instead of continuing the planning process centrally, Young shifted the responsibility to the district offices, where foresters supplemented the information provided by the Woodstock strategic plan with their own detailed knowledge of the local landscape. The district foresters drew harvest blocks by hand, taking into account things a central planner wouldn't necessarily know about such as slope gradients and watersheds.

GIS specialists operating in the district offices digitized the harvest blocks using ArcView GIS and produced shapefiles that were sent to a GIS analyst at JDI's head office who used ArcInfo to check and edit the files.

"In the districts, planned forest interventions for the next 25 years are laid out," Young says. "This ArcView GIS application has been coded with Avenue script to guide the user and ensure clean data. We checked the shapefiles to ensure that there was topology; that all the data was normalized; and that there was a period, a prescription, and all the correct attributes were associated with every single polygon--and there were thousands of polygons."

The final products were maps created with ArcInfo and ArcView GIS that are detailed, visual representations of JDI's forest management plans.

All the updated GIS data was combined into a single shapefile--representing close to one million hectares of land--and spatial criteria such as block size, opening size, and adjacency violations were then checked using Stanley, Remsoft's spatial harvest block scheduling software.

In a matter of minutes, Stanley had checked tens of thousands of the manually laid out blocks and flagged 4 percent that had compromised the company's spatial criteria. With a quick edit, all blocks were made to comply with spatial regulations.

Plantation Wood

The next level in the JDI planning process was to add the managed stands-that is, the mixwood and softwood planted stands-to the harvest schedule.

Incorporating the managed wood into the plan was a three-step process. First, JDI used Stanley to place spatial restrictions on the stands, essentially "locking out" adjacent stands from being harvested in the same period or within 10 years.

Once the spatial constraints were set, Young and his team used Woodstock to check that the managed forest blocks complied with the nonspatial objectives specified earlier such as timber flow and biodiversity.

With a few adjustments, the managed blocks were put together with the natural forest blocks in a shapefile. Stanley then produced detailed spatial harvest schedules for the next 25 years along with maps showing the locations of logging activity, animal habitat, old growth forests, and sites of special interest over a 25-year planning horizon.

"The process worked very well, and we were able to get our plans submitted weeks ahead of schedule," says Young, who has used the spatial forest planning process as a blueprint to formulate management plans for its freehold property in Maine and elsewhere in the Maritimes, Canada.

"Each time we do a management plan, we learn something new. We are always improving the process and making better plans the next round," says Young.

Such visually detailed plans have become increasingly necessary due to the plethora of aesthetic, environmental, and commercial planning constraints imposed on forestry companies today.

Government, environmental groups, and the general public all want to know more about the activities of forestry companies, and maps showing proposed activities are invaluable communication tools for doing this. In addition to pinpointing where wood will be cut, such spatial plans can illustrate where wildlife habitat, travel corridors, and water-course buffers are and show that protected areas are indeed protected.

Visit www.jdirving.com for more information about JD Irving, Limited. Visit www.remsoft.com for more information about Woodstock.