Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/75042
Investment in the current program started with $7.5 million in 2006/2007 and then increased to $10 mil- lion per year starting in 2007/2008. The Crown is covering 100 percent of the program's cost, but there's opportunity for the forest industry (and others) to contribute additional funds to collect information that goes beyond the new program. Enhancements to the FRI program include moving to a 10-year inventory cycle, evolution to a continuous inventory update, expanded geographic scope, moving to higher-quality information through implementation of new technologies and enhancements to the program's "field" component. The FRI program is comprised of five major compo- nents: 1. Image acquisition and processing 2. Field sampling 3. Image interpretation 4. Post-FRI assessment 5. Permanent forest-inventory plots Imagery for the enhanced FRI program was captured by North West Geomatics using Leica ADS40 SH52/ ADS80 airborne digital sensors. Imagery products include 20-centimeter stereo panchromatic and 40- centimeter stereo multispectral (true-color and color- infrared) data, 20-centimeter panchromatic and 40- centimeter multispectral digital orthoimagery strips, and 35-centimeter multispectral orthoimagery tiles. "In terms of project size, the imagery resolution and depth of products being delivered, this was one of, if not the biggest airborne survey in North America," says Murray Radford, coordinator, Forest Resources Inventory, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. The stereo products are used for stereoscopic view- ing, parallax extraction, tree-species identification, tree-stocking estimates, tree-height measurements and stereoscopic feature extraction. The orthoimagery tiles are used for image backdrops for GIS, Web Map Services, field applications and base-data feature cap- ture. The orthoimagery strips are used for automated feature-extraction processes and specific extraction processes that require nadir views. Why Digital? Benefits of using digital imagery include the following: handheld data recorder. improve disturbance detection for calibration plot allocation (see Figure 1). boating or floatplane hazards when planning access to remote calibration plots. Figure 2. A fieldworker takes a core sample to determine a tree's age. JUL Y 2O12 / WWW . GEOPLA CE . COM 23 to ground crews in advance. and mapped. "By using more-accurate imagery, and thereby improving the accuracy of the inventory products, we can increase the confidence our end users have in our products, so they will be able to make better Figure 1. Field-calibration plots are located on true-color orthoimagery to improve disturbance detection.