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Forest Metrix

Resources

Free tools and guides for foresters.

Things we’ve made or helped make over the years. All free, whether or not you use Forest Metrix.

GIS

QGIS for Foresters

QGIS is free, capable, and friendlier to technology-shy foresters than the big commercial GIS packages. Our crash course, first given as a workshop at the 2019 Society of American Foresters convention, takes a forester with no GIS experience through a typical project, ending with a georeferenced PDF map you can use in the field. Plan on an hour or two the first time and 15 minutes once you know it.

Installing the Cruise Grid Creator

  1. Download the plugin zip and save it to your computer.
  2. In QGIS, open Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins → Install from ZIP, choose the file, and install.
  3. Make a boundary shapefile of the property or stand as one continuous polygon (the crash course shows how).
  4. Open Plugins → Forest Metrix Tools → Cruise Grid Creator, pick the boundary, set the grid bearing and the distance between plots, and click Run. 20 meters is almost exactly one chain, so 80 m gives a 4-chain grid.

Forest Metrix itself now lays out cruise grids on the map, with no GIS needed. See how →

Carbon

Carbon considerations

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management produced two short pamphlets, with help from Forest Metrix, to help foresters answer client questions about carbon and help landowners think about carbon in their management goals. We also built a spreadsheet that turns basic stand data from a cruise into a rough estimate of carbon stored per stand, for Rhode Island forest types. Its formulas and coefficients were developed by William Van Doren of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.

The work was funded in part by a USDA Forest Service grant to the Northeast State Foresters Association and by RIDEM’s Forest Stewardship Program. For the latest on forest carbon in the region, see northeastforestcarbon.org.

Archive

From the old blog

Field notes, wildlife, and our surveys of foresters and arborists, 2013 to 2020. Browse the archive →