Improving forest operations planning through high-resolution flow-channel and wet-areas mapping

This article describes a mapping process designed to provide forest management with high-resolution flow-channel and wet-area maps for forest operations planning. The process requires digital elevation models (DEMs) and hydrographic data, and also portrays the likely depth to surface water across forested terrains away from any nearest surface-water features such as streams, rivers, lakes, and wetlands. Map applications involve layout of roads and trails, automated selection of best road–stream crossings, minimizing earth-moving operations during road construction, detailing in-block plans for temporary roads and channel crossings, and delineating habitats, machine-free zones and blocks for harvesting, tree planting, site preparation, and stand thinning. Map verifications centre on visual comparisons of map features with land-surface images, and these can be coupled with GPS tracking of wetland and wet-area borders, stream channels, and road-stream crossings. Further developments involve increasing the wet-areas map resolution and accuracy with LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) bare-ground DEMs and other fine-gridded DEMs, and expanding the applications to mapping of soils, soil properties and tree and crop productivity, to watershed and road-network management, to off-road trafficability, and to impact evaluations dealing with hydrological sensitivities and risks. Key words: forest operations planning, geographic information systems, digital elevation models, flow-channels, wet areas and depth-to-water maps, hydrological risks