ESRI UC Forestry SIG - Thank you!

[MarkBooks2]

What a great turn out! Thank you to everyone who attended the 2015 Esri UC Forestry Special Interest Group. With over 80 in attendance, we'll need a bigger room next year.

A special thank you to all the speakers:

Keynote: From Resource to Value

Baard Hansen, IT Development Manager, Statskog SF

Statskog SF is Norway’s largest landowner, owned by the ministry of agriculture. Its main business areas are forestry and resource management, and property management and development. Statskog SF has over the last 6 years had a strong strategic focus on implementing GIS as a natural part of business decisions and production solutions, and the result from the project ‘From Resource to Value' shows how far Statskog has come with its GIS forestry solutions. This talk will focus on how Statskog succeeded implementing GIS in their organization and will provide an overview of forestry solutions available for the management, planners, partners, entrepreneurs, government, and customers.

ArcGIS Pro for Forestry

Bruce Harold, Product Manager, Esri

ArcGIS Pro tasks are preconfigured steps that interactively guide a user through a specific workflow. Tasks make it easy for users of all GIS experience levels to complete standard workflows—from the simple to complex—and efficiently repeat when needed. Hear about the basic principles and options to design well-authored tasks that can be shared throughout your organization. You will also see how ArcGIS Pro tasks can be used to enforce organizational best practices and act as tutorials for new ArcGIS Pro users.

Discovering Resources from a Thriving Forestry GIS Community

Mark Books, President, Esri Forestry Group

Elizabeth Martinez, Esri Forestry Group

Connect with the Esri Forestry Group (EFG) and discover some of the latest developments in GIS for forestry as well as connect with other forestry professionals. Presentations will be fast paced and informative. All of which is aimed to increase your return on investment in GIS for managing your forest.

Delivering Timber to Mills

Pieter Human, GIS Technology Specialist, Sappi Forests

Pieter will focus on the implementation of a fixed cost network analysis that simulates the running cost, potential road upgrade costs and depot (landing) construction costs. This analysis application determines the most cost effective way of delivering timber to the mills. Also determining timber catchments, potential extraction methods and generate a cost report on the felling period.

Strategic Forest Planning in the Cloud

Elliot Sullivan, Product Manager, Remsoft

This lightning talk will provide a demonstration of advances in cloud-based strategic forest planning, powered by Remsoft’s industry-leading modeling platform. Deploying Remsoft technology on the cloud allows named users (planners) to adjust the parameters of a strategic forest model, built with Esri spatial data, and solve this model from within a browser window. Both the schedule and key performance measures can then be analyzed and viewed on a map – via an on premises cloud - or on a graph within the web client.

So You Want to Buy a Drone?

Ron Behrendt, Managing Director, Behron & Associates

This talk focus on assisting new comers to the field of UAVs sift through the many details involved in understanding the various technologies, reviewing the tradeoffs, and identifying key considerations before purchasing a system. Topics discussed include an overview of common UAV subsystems (i.e. airframes, auto-pilots, sensors, etc.), various operating characteristics (i.e. flight duration, launch/retrieval dynamics, field serviceability, etc.), and why GIS is likely an important element of any operational system. Finally, challenges regarding buying a UAV will be summarized with the hope of assisting audience members gain an improved understand of the technologies and trade-offs so as to make better buying decisions