Ecological Foresters, Managers or Participants?

My lapse in posting has been due to a very busy work schedule.  Recently, I was assigned to head a rather large ecosystem management planning project in addition to the usual background busyness.  This project has me thinking again about the role of mangers and plans in the context of ecological forestry.  One of the most interesting aspects of being a practitioner of ecological forestry is the unpredictability of ecological systems.  I have found managing forests to be a humbling business, but I think that it is this aspect of forest management that also keeps it so intriguing.

In my own experience one of the most astonishing moments is coming to the realization that I'm not really "managing" anything at all in the classical sense.  Ecosystem managers interact with ecosystems and then await the systems' response.  Sometimes the response is predictable and sometimes it is not.  Ecological forestry is not picking a bunch of narrowly defined parameters for habitat and hacking away at the ecosystem until it resembles something out of a textbook.  It involves input from the manager and then feedback from the ecosystem.  It's the ecosystem that makes the changes over time and the manager's role to interact with the system in order to illicit changes with some objectives in mind.  In managing forests I often find myself interacting with the ecosystem.  I get a response from the forest based upon my choices but also find my choices being changed based upon feedback from the forest that I am managing.  So, I tend to look at ecosystem managers as participating in ecological processes more than directly "managing" them.   I wanted to throw this idea out there for whoever reads this to consider.  It's just a thought in the midst of a busy month...

Google Earth for Ecological Forestry KML/KMZ's

Google Earth (GE) is a great tool for all kinds of tasks related to natural resource management.  Even the free version provides access to all sorts of handy tools and data.  I've been meaning to do a post about GE for awhile now.  Not that this topic hasn't been covered by others many times before; I just think that I will try to compile some of the most useful hints that I got from scouring the internet in one place.  I had originally intended to cover many aspects of Google Earth in a single comprehensive post.  However, my schedule seems to be making this difficult.  So, I have decided that I will try to cover some different aspects of GE in several posts.  In this post, I will discuss KML and KMZ files.  These files are very useful for sharing data in GE.  Effectively sharing information seems to be one of the most crucial aspects of ecological land management which often involves coordinating diverse groups of people with varying professional backgrounds.

Using KML's and KMZ's for Sharing Data

KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language.  It is used by Google Earth for creating and sharing placemarkers and infromation.  KML files can be viewed in GE much like a web page can be viewed and interpreted by your browser.  For documentation on KML, see the KML Documentation page or have a look at the KML tutorial.  In addition to point locations, lines, and polygons, related images and icons can be zipped with the KML information and shared as a KMZ file.  These files can be saved, emailed, or even linked to on the web so that the information can be shared easily with others, which is very handy.

In Google Earth, creating a KML or KMZ file is easy.  Any placemarks, polygons, or paths that you create in GE can be saved as a KML or a KMZ simply by selecting the "File"menu --> "save" --> "save place as".  Alternatively, you can save an individual feature by right clicking the feature in the "Places" window and then selecting "save place as".  Remember, that if you want to save image overlays and custom icons as a part of the view that you are better off using a KMZ, rather than KML.

Exporting ESRI Shapefiles and ArcMap Data to Google Earth

There is a lot of great data available for free in the form of shapefiles on the web from various not-for-profits and government agencies.  Sometimes it is also necessary to use GIS information generated in-house in order to make operational maps viewable in GE or on the web.  Recently, I was trying to conduct a forest inventory with a group of people.  I wanted an inventory progress map available on the web, so that field personnel could easily have access to a map of the region indicating work that was assigned, needing to be done, and completed day to day.  Using KML's proved very useful for this purpose.

If you have access to ArcMap:

There is an Export to KML script available from ESRI.  There is a great tutorial on how to install and use the ArcMap script available at the GETA website  GETA stands for Geospatial Equipment and Application.  It is a group that focuses on using Geospatial technologies for incident command situations, mainly wildfire suppression.  I have provided a link to their website because it has some handy information regarding GE and some very nice tutorials. 

If you do not have access to ArcMap:

If you don't have access to ArcMap, you can still export shapefiles to KML.  To do this, you will first have to download MapWindow GIS.  The good news is, it is free and open source.

Then you will have to download and install the shape2earth extension for MapWindow.  This extension can be used for 500 exports for free and then may be purchased for $30 US.  I cannot remember if the extension just shows up in MapWindow as a menu option after being installed or if it must be enabled in the "plugins"menu.

You should then see a shape2earth menu.  In this menu there will be an option to "export to KML".

This option will allow you to export the active shapefile to a KML.

So, that's a primer on creating KML's/KMZ's.  I am going to try to do a few posts about Google Earth because I think it is a great resource when trying to coordinate diverse groups of professionals and stakeholders.  I have used it for coordinating field activities and am hoping to use GE for a large land management project that I am currently working on.  Hopefully there are others out there that will find this helpful!  Happy mapping!

International Year of Forests

Photo from UN International Year of Forests website

This year the United Nations General Assembly declared 2011 as the International Year of Forests to raise awareness on sustainable management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests.  See the link above for the UN website on International Year of Forests.  The UN slogan for the year is "Forests for People".  Many countries and states in the US are organizing events, publications, websites, and other educational opportunities in celebration of the Year of Forests.  This is an exciting opportunity for those with an interest in ecological forestry. We have a chance to demonstrate how human interaction with forests can simultaneously benefit both humans and forests to a much broader audience.  It also gives ecosystem managers a platform to showcase some of our methods with the public as well as other practitioners.  If you, your town, county, state, country, etc. is doing something for International Year of Forests, feel free to comment about it.  I had a short part in one of the films that was shown at the film festival and will be speaking about my part in it on a panel of experts next month.  I hope to have more on that later.

Canopy Closure from Digital Photos Using ImageJ

When working with interdisciplinary teams, I find the topic of canopy closure coming up continually. Many typical forest inventories summarize forest attributes in terms of trees per unit area, volume, basal area or even stand density index. Ecosystem managers with backgrounds outside of forestry tend to find these measures difficult to envision, so I find myself being asked how a forest looks in terms of percent canopy closure. Several types of densiometers exist but I have found most of them inconsistent, expensive, or require an excessively large sample in order to produce viable results.

Recently, I decided to try using a digital camera mounted horizontally on a folding tripod and then interpreting the forest canopy from open sky in the photo in order to estimate canopy closure. Several researchers have used this method already with varying success, but most of them made use of expensive software such as ERDAS Imagine in order to process the images. While doing some tinkering in Linux, I came across a handy image processing program called ImageJ. ImageJ is public domain and can be enhanced by creating macros and/or java plugins. Information on ImageJ can be found on wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageJ

Although I have been experimenting with it in Linux (mainly Ubuntu and Linux Mint) where it can be downloaded using the software manager or synaptic package handler, it can also be downloaded for other platforms here. I'll describe a simple method for deriving canopy closure using Imagej in this post that does not require any plugins or special software beyond the basic ImageJ public domain software. I did not have thousands of photos to process, so this process worked for me. If you do have lots of photos to process, you may want to find or write a plugin in order to automate the process. To search for pugins you could try here. I did not spend a lot of time hunting for plugins and do not really know if anything exists that would have suited my purposes. Below are step by step instructions for what I did. I'm always open to suggestions on how this could be done better, so feel free to comment.

Step by Step Instructions:

1. Once you download and install ImageJ, just open the software and then use it to open a photo like the one below.

2. Next go to the "Process" menu, select "Binary", then select "Make Binary"



This will take a color or grayscale photo and covert it to a binary black and white image
allowing the software to easily distinguish pixels representing the canopy from those representing the sky.



3. Next from the "Analyze" menu select "Histogram".



4. From here, you can select to save the histogram as an excel spreadsheet.



The resulting spreadsheet seems to be tab delimted, even though it gets saved as an .xls file. Make sure you note which color denotes closed canopy (in this case black, value 255), and which denotes open sky (in this case white, value 0). If the sky is very blue or cloudy, sometimes the canopy gets interpreted as white and the sky comes out black. I just denoted canopy as "closed" in my spreadsheet and sky as "open".

5. In the spreadsheet I divided the number of "closed" pixels by total pixels and multiplied by 100 in order to get percent canopy closure for each photo. These results can then be averaged for all of the photos in a stand, etc.

Using ImageJ for interpreting digital photos in order to calculate canopy closure is relatively easy. I am hoping to use results from these types of samples in order to calibrate and test some of the canopy closure models out there that can make estimates using more conventional inventory data, speeding up data collection. Hope this is helpful to someone else out there! ImageJ seems to have a lot of potential and it's free!

Welcome to The Ecological Forester!

The face of forestry and natural resource management is changing rapidly. Foresters typically find themselves acting as supporting players in part of a larger team making decisions regarding land management. Ecological forestry involves forest land management in a much broader sense than many traditional practitioners may be used to. The purpose of this blog is not to try to define ecological forestry. If you are looking for more background on concepts and definitions, take a look at the Ecological Forestry Resource Center on the Forest Guild website.

I am hoping that this blog will serve as platform for practitioners of ecological forestry to share information about tools and techniques that they are currently using. You need not be a forester to have an interest in ecological forestry. Ecosystem management is most often conducted by diverse teams of professionals, landowners, and stakeholders. Over the next few months, I would like to take some time look at some of the tools and data that are cheaply or freely available to land managers. These types of tools are crucial because good land management should not be restricted to wealthy land owners or only good economic times. Welcome to The Ecological Forester!