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   Maps and Information

From legal land description questions to species, special features, and/or habitat inventories, Timberline Forestry can provide you expertise and valuable insight into the attributes of your land.

Whether your woodland management method is no-action or intensively managed,
it is important to know the attributes of your woodlands. 

Assistance Available

Anywhere

Confidentiality, if requested, will be
honored with the highest integrity.

All quality forest management efforts start out with a map.  Whether you need a basic land map or a multi-layer GIS supported database, Timberline Forestry can create a map that is based on your needs.

The sample maps shown below have been created using Timberline Forestry’s cartography software library.  Information that can be incorporated on maps is virtually unlimited.

This simple map was desiged to “georeference” trees that were important for a landowner to retain during timber harvest operations.  Each tree was indentified by a series of painted marks on the trunk. Then the location was taken with a GPS and recorded. The precision of this location was 15 feet, which allows easy relocation of the trees. Special language in the timber harvesting contract would define values for the trees should they be damaged during operations. The trees could have any sort of attributes. They might be favorite trees or wildlife den trees.  In this instance they were particularly well-formed crop trees that could potentially bring much higher prices than at the current time if retained until a future harvest.

A sidenote to mapping features:
Do you think that your fence is on your property boundary? Do you know?  The landowner that put up this barbed wire fence was encroaching on public land at the time of installation.  The survey corner is not the tree with the three blue-green slash marks, but near a post that is behind it! The fence was nearly 100 feet away from the actual line!  The installers of the fence probably used a compass with poor precision and/or did not consider magnetic declination.

Declination is the difference of true North relative to magnetic North, the direction a compass points.  Using a compass without accounting for declination will create an error in a trajectory. The error becomes larger as a longer distance is traveled and the error is also affected by what proximity a path is to the agonic line. To learn more about declination, click here.

The following is a map that was published as part of a state of Michigan Commercial Forest Program forest management plan, only the original title and locations have been changed to keep the landowner’s information private.  This is an example of the most popular type of forest management maps, showing the property boundary lines and having the natural and man made features delinated with a legend that is clear and easy to read for anyone. The original size of these maps have been reduced to preserve internet bandwidth. 

The map above is a simple map based on 1:24,000 USGS topograpical maps showing exterior boundaries of an area and the main stream flowing through the property.  It shows a scale, a reference to basic declination of the area, a caption, county roads, watercourses and topographical relief.

The map below is based on a color infared aerial image.  It shows the same area as the map above, only all of the watercourses have been delineated.  There is a legend that defines each land type component and a scale with a bar to estimate ground distances from the map.  This is a very simple map created for demonstration purposes.  Every stand can be delineated and defined the same way the watercourses are.  Information from each stand’s inventory can be put into a database for the purpose of keeping an inventory and/or making management decisions based on matrices calculations. The aerial image-based map shows greater detail than the topographical-based map as you can see a semi-circular driveway just outside the Southeast corner of the boundary line. Another nice feature of this medium is that conifers (pines, spruce, fir, etc.,) show up as a pink/red color and deciduous vegitation (oak, maple, aspen, etc.,) show up green in color. This map style is much more convenient for land management or reconnaissance efforts.  Note that the acreage of the watercourses have been determined.

To inquire about mapping projects, please click here.

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