Testing Large Scale Photography To Sample Plots For Forest Inventory In Mixed Hardwood Forests Of The Great Lakes St Lawrence Region Of Ontario

Large-scale photography (LSP) may be a useful tool to measure traditional and non-traditional forest attributes. This paper evaluates an LSP system for plot sampling in Great Lakes-St. Lawrence forests by comparing the utility of leaf-off and leaf-on imagery, assessing targeting accuracy, and comparing ground and LSP values for some commonly measured inventory, research and monitoring variables, and for less commonly measured variables.

"This bibliography includes a list and descriptions of the content of publications written or co-authored by staff of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources' Ontario Forest Research Institute between 2006 and 2010. During this five-year period, over 150 publications were produced by the institute's 14 research scientists, including a book, 83 journal articles, 31 reports, 10 technical notes, 5 newsletters, and 11 papers/summaries in conference/ workshop proceedings. The overall focus of the publications is forest resource management-related research and practice. Topical areas and scales of investigation are diverse and include natural disturbance regimes and landscape dynamics; carbon budgets and effects of climate change on forests; and silviculture studies on site preparation, tree improvement, vegetation management, growth and yield, disease management, and harvesting in conifer, mixedwood, and hardwood forests. Author and subject indexes are provided."--Document.

In the study reported in this document, three complementary methodologies using existing mapped and remotely sensed data for a 400-square-kilometre test area in northern Ontario were developed and tested to discriminate forest soil conditions important to operational forest management planning. All three approaches use geographic information system technology in concert with expert systems to define soil polygons, and appear to be especially suitable for geographic areas where appropriate forest soil mapping is either currently unavailable, is of unknown quality, or is available only at smaller than required scales. The methods integrate digital spatial data from five sources such as provincial forest resource inventories, satellite imagery, and National Topographic System base maps.

Third demonstration trial of a new forest inventory method based on large-scale photographs, which presented the challenge of steep topography.