Contiguous Forest Mapping
CLIENT/LOCATION
Islands Trust – Southern Gulf Islands, BC
DATE
2020
Background
The Islands Trust and the Islands Trust Conservancy are continuously working to advance Coastal Douglas-fir (CDF) zone protection throughout the Islands Trust Area. Accurate mapping and data analysis provide the evidence that underpins policy, regulatory, and legal conservation tools.
Challenge
As part of ongoing conservation efforts, the client wanted to identify forested ecosystems within regional land use planning areas. They required mapping products to help prioritize stands for ecosystem protection.
Solution
Through close consultation with planners and conservation professionals, Cabin developed criteria-based constraints mapping that identified contiguous forest areas and ranked them based on disturbance thresholds. This analysis integrated Terrestrial Ecosystem Mapping (TEM) with additional spatial data and orthophoto interpretation to develop a customized forest inventory database in ArcGIS and SQL. The mapping showed the landscape-scale distribution of quality-ranked stands, while the data retained site-level TEM and disturbance attributes that could be queried in the client’s internal web map application. Sites suitable for ecosystem restoration were also identified. Cartography was created for ease of interpretation by decision-makers, stakeholders and the public. A detailed technical report was submitted which described the methodology, rationale, guidelines for interpretation of the data and recommendations for its use in conservation planning.
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