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ABSTRACT
Digital Forestry has been proposed as "the science, technology, and art of systematically acquiring, integrating, analyzing, and applying digital information to support sustainable forests." 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. Digital Forestry is a framework that links all facets of forestry information at local, national, and global levels through an organized digital network. It is anticipated that a new set of principles will be established when practicing Digital Forestry concept for the evolution of forestry education, research, and practices as the 21st century unfolds.
Keywords: digital technology; quantitative method; forest sustainability; ecosystem management; global network
New computationally intensive quantitative methods and digital technologies have been evolving for the past several decades. Enormous amounts of digital data and information are available about the distributions, structures, and dynamics of global vegetation cover, regional forest ecosystems, forested landscapes, stands and trees; much of it in databases on terrain, soil, climate, streams and rivers, wildlife, flora, transportation, and/or human activities, or captured as information in models about these features. Even more exists as a vast archive of raw, remotely sensed data. The synergetic use of geo-spatial, statistical, and modeling technologies together with information technologies are perhaps the most important development influencing the way forestry is practiced, taught, and researched.
The potential for the integrated application of these new technologies is tremendous. Imagine, for example, a forest planner scheduling a complex timber harvest operation. After roadside-parking her truck by a timber tract in which she plans to harvest, she turns on her laptop with wireless network connection, she sees "a digital representation of the forests" on the screen: trees, logging roads, decks, streamside zoning boundaries, and skid trails of the tract surrounding her. After examining details, she visually "flies through" adjacent tracts to have "birds-eye" view of surrounding tracts. A couple more clicks, and information about the tract's topography (slope and exposure), soil conditions, hydrology, and estimated timber volume appears. With a handheld PC equipped with GPS, she steps out of her truck, walks around and starts to collect information on changes in trees, roads, soil...