<p>Characterizing Forests using ArcView GIS</p><p>Overview Author: Glen Jordan, RPF "We are drowning in information, while starving for knowledge. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." E.O. Wilson, 1998, from Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge GIS is a powerful tool for assembling the right forest information and helping make wise forest management choices. ArcView GIS brings that power to your desktop. This course emphasizes learning GIS through forestry applications. It's composed of six instructional modules, built around GIS-forestry concepts. Each module offers hands-on exercises in which you use data from a small university-owned and managed woodlot in Atlantic Canada. This course exposes you to the way forest managers use GIS to characterize forests with maps, numbers, tables, and charts. You use actual forest inventory data to map forest attributes, calculate timber and non-timber values, assess clear cutting activities, calculate forest landscape metrics, delineate management units, and stratify forest stands. You’ll finish the course with a working knowledge of advanced GIS techniques for characterizing forests with ArcView GIS.</p><p>Modules  Mapping Forest Attributes  Calculating Forest Values  Assessing Harvest Activities  Measuring Forest Landscapes  Defining Management Units  Compiling Forest Strata </p><p>Goals After completing this course, you’ll be able to:  create effective thematic maps  calculate fiber and non-fiber forest values  create new forest attributes, and even new features, from existing ones  run Avenue scripts to calculate feature geometry, identify polygons inside a region, and measure distances  distinguish quantitative and qualitative forest characterizations  distinguish nominal, ordinal and ratio data types  identify clear cut openings and their size distribution  identify clear cuts adjacent to forest roads, and calculate the amount of roadside affected  identify and form forest patches  quantify diversity and fragmentation in a forest landscape  quantify dispersion of an animal's feeding and breeding habitats  calculate patch density, Simpson's Diversity Index, and the Mean Nearest Neighbor measure of dispersion  distinguish measures of landscape composition and configuration (pattern)  delineate and characterize forest management units  identify the riparian forest by buffering water features  identify a forest's mature coniferous component  perform and interpret map overlay  stratify forest stands  identify and label stands by development type, age class, and accessibility </p>