Forestry Uses of GIS

Welcome to blogs.oregonstate.edu. This site was developed for Geography 560 at Oregon State University. It contains an annotated bibliography of academic articles of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) being used in forestry applications. GIS are used extensively in natural resources management and forestry. This site has collected varying articles on the wide range of uses in the field including the use in wildfire mitigation, fuel reduction, forest road construction, forest thinning treatments, growth modeling and many others. These topics are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to GIS in forestry, GIS has led to many advances in forestry and is now used with most if not all forestry agencies. As is pointed out in Rongxia et al. (2007) spatial analysis and spatial analysis software are being taught in college classrooms around the country allowing forest managers to perform spatial analysis whereas in the past only highly trained technicians could accomplish these tasks. These advances in the software being used as well as the ease of use have allowed forest management to evolve drastically. It seems logical that spatial analysis will continue to advance and thus the field of forestry will advance alongside it.