Forest informatics

Forest informatics is a multidisciplinary field of science that "harnesses the power of computational and information technologies to organize and analyze biological data from research collections, experiments, remote sensing, modeling, database searches and instrumentation and deliver them to users throughout the world." Computational and information management technologies used to support decision-making activities in the field of forest informatics include decision support systems, mathematical modeling software, statistical and algorithmic analysis tools, geographic information systems, global positioning systems, and shared databases.

History

In 1970, J. G. Grevatt wrote an article titled, "Management Information and Computers in Forestry." In the article, the author describes and discusses different dimensions of management information (i.e. operation, expenditure, location, and time) including the nature of management information and decisions, management information in forestry, the management information system itself, the application of computers, the structure of a computer based system, comparisons between clerical and computer systems, and the impact on the field manager. The author concludes that the use of computers to process management data may be justified on grounds of cost and improved information in organizations of a critical size.

At the time of that article, computers, databases, and geographic information systems were still in their infancy and tools like the Global Positioning Systems of today were yet invented. Management database systems for business were more prevalent. Over the next 30 years, computers became more powerful, smaller, and less expensive. Relational database management systems had become commonplace in business, interrogating the computer system had become standardized with languages like SQL, and faster networks for data and information integration have become highly integrated. In that time, geographic information systems that could run on desktop computers and could be customized for various tasks were also developed, but as separate systems.

Within the last 10 years, specialized fields of study at the University level are offered at the several forestry schools where students learn the principles of quantification, modeling, descriptive and predictive analyses of natural resources attributes needed for sound management of forested ecosystems.

Software specifically devoted to analyzing management decisions for forested ecosystems have been developed, and used in several large scale planning projects. For example, the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system is an application framework for knowledge-based decision support of ecological analysis and planning. Open source software solutions have also become more widely accepted as well, as is seen in the expansion of ecological extensions for statistical tools like R. A recent example would be the book written by Andrew Robinson and Jeff D. Hamann about using R for forest analytics .

Application

Common forestry problems include harvest scheduling, model fitting, optimal sampling, remote sensing, crew assignment, image classification, treatment timing, and log bucking problems, many of which can be formulated as optimization problems (e.g. generalized assignment problem, traveling salesman problem, knapsack problem, job shop scheduling, and vehicle routing problems).

Notes

This article reuses some elements from the Wikipedia article.