How long does it take to measure the diameter of a big tree with a diameter tape? Five seconds? Twenty seconds? A minute? In all honesty, it depends on the amount of debris around the base and whether you have a good spot to hook on your tape. There is nothing more frustrating that walking the tape around to the far side of a big tree, only for it’s anchor point to become dislodged and the tape measure falls off.
How many of these measurements could you do in a day? In forestry, foresters tend to aim to sample about half to one percent of a plot. This can be hundreds of measurements and take hours or even days.
What if I told you, all you have to do is carry a camera and film your walk through the forest to get the position, diameter and a range of other attributes of the stand?
At TerraLab, we are huge advocates for removing the human subjectivity and bias out of the equation and reporting in objective and repeatable ways. Not to mention the efficiency gain that such a workflow brings. These methods would also be highly applicable for assessments under state sanctioned methods such as the Native Vegetation Guidelines, where tree assessments are an integral part.
Using this technology, we can measure thousands of trees per day to within small percentages of tape measurements (and who’s to say the tape measurements are the objective point of truth anyway?).
And it doesn’t stop there. The methods we have at our disposal can also quantify the density of young plants in a revegetation setting. No more tape measures, quadrats or sample plots. A simple walk through with the camera recording. Recall our previous post about whether your revegetation monitoring methods even have the statistical significance required to detect your losses.
Contact us to find out how we can help reduce the cost of your forest inventory and revegetation monitoring.