forest managers

digital mapping services for everyone

Digital mapping using Geographical Information Systems, or GIS, is now a common tool for managing woodlands and other ground.

Increasingly, managers, owners, stakeholders, timber merchants and statutory agencies expect to see professional looking and accurate maps accompanying management plans, felling licence applications, woodland planting proposals, and grant applications, to name but a few of the very many situations where hand-drawn maps will no longer suffice.

Indeed, even if you are not actively involved in any of these activities, an accurate digital map of your forest, farm, estate or work site can serve as a versatile and useful management tool.

Unfortunately, producing these maps can be a slow and expensive process even with experience of using digital mapping software.

This is where I can help.

I can produce digital maps at a fixed-price or cost effective rate, whether you require a one-off map for a single project or wish to maintain an ever-evolving record of your woodland, forest, farm, estate or other land holding.

The resulting maps can be supplied in paper form, in digital form (PDF or other format) or as an ESRI-compatible shapefile. This makes it easy to take ownership of the data, use it in-house or pass it on to other parties.

There are many circumstances in which the digital mapping service that I provide could be of use to you:

• If you are a forest manager, subcontracting mapping work such as felling licence applications or woodland creation plans allows you to concentrate on other aspects of your workload to keep projects moving forward. Subcontracting larger mapping jobs - such as long-term forest plans - for a fixed-price provides a welcome level of certainty in an aspect of your work where costs often accrue and exceed initial expectations and budgets.

• Farmers, crofters and land agents will benefit from using GIS to improve the accuracy of IACS maps where Single Farm Payments and agricultural subsidies are being claimed. Furthermore, insurance premiums may be reduced when land is measured more accurately; GPS and mobile technology can be utilised to identify unproductive ground and record features that have an impact on production; areas and quantities can be measured accurately and used to manage costs when contractors are being paid the acre, hectare or linear metre. Click here for information on other digital mapping services that I provide in respect of the SRDP and IACS maps.

• Community woodland groups will find digital mapping an essential woodland management tool, from the initial planning stages through to ongoing and future development of the forest resource. My sympathetic pricing policy for community groups should help with those early stages of the project, providing maps and data in support of applications to the Scottish Land Fund. I can also produce scoping reports and help with assessing development potential for woodlands at very competitive rates.

• If you are a private woodland owner or an estate, you probably already have some form of map of your land holding. For very little outlay, I can digitise that old-style map to provide you with a modern tool that delivers all of the above-mentioned benefits. With further work, I can use aerial photography and time on the ground to improve it's accuracy. Once this digitising has been done, I can quickly produce different styles of map to suit all purposes, including for use during management meetings, for providing information to guests and shooting syndicates, or for simply hanging on your office wall.

• Public sector clients usually have their own dedicated GIS departments. My systems are compatible with your own and this creates a wealth of opportunities to use your data across the range of services I provide. For example, I can produce operations and safety maps for my tree planting contractors working on your sites using your data and I can incorporate and ground-truth your data when undertaking stocking assessments, timber mensuration or other survey work when in the field.

• If you are a rural business or other organisation that does not fit into any of the above categories, there is a good chance that I can still use GIS to your advantage. This applies whether you are new to digital mapping or already you have your own systems. With a tailor-made and fixed-price service, I can help with digital mapping needs of individual projects, site surveys and GPS data gathering and many other aspects of managing a land holding.

Please use the links below for more information on a few of the ways I can help.

It is not an exhaustive list, so feel free to use the form and contact details here to send me your own requirements or questions.