The paper provides a general overview of the various applications of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in forestry, based on Canadian experience. It describes the use of GPS to raise the productivity at the field operations level and also to reduce the cost of the increasing forest management activities. The integration of GPS technologies with computerized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a keystone to the success of forest management and planning of the associated forest activities.
GPS applications briefly discussed are:
Forest road profiling (as an input to other decision-making package)
Forest fire management support (in-flight use of portable GIS + GPS equipment)
Quickly finding true location and shapes of areas under treatment (bypass aerial photos)
Silvicultural treatment quality control (coverage, row spacing, equipment velocity, location, orientation...)
Real-time navigation of harvesting machinery
The real-time navigation example is covered in more depth to demonstrate how effective an integrated GIS-GPS system can be guiding the machinery on the site to observe the planned areas of commercial and environmentally restricted zones in forest operations, and in collecting very valuable field data that is immediately used to update the originating GIS. The discussion also demonstrate the practical problems that were addressed during the implementation of a pilot system into a commercial operation and the potential impact of generalized implementation of such a system.
Key words: GPS, GIS real-time navigation, forest monitoring.
Correspondence: Daniel Guimier, Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada, 580 boul. Saint-Jean, Pointe-Claire, Quebec H9R 3J9 Canada
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