Biography
Derek Churchill is both a forester and scientist who focuses on applying ecological knowledge to on-the-ground forest management challenges across the Pacific Northwest. He has run a forestry consulting company for 10 years that specializes in ecological forestry on public and private land. He has done a wide variety of projects on National Forests throughout Washington, Oregon, and California, and has worked extensively with forest collaboratives. He also has longstanding relationships and ongoing projects with the Nature Conservancy, Conservation NW, the Klamath Tribe, King County, and the PEW Charitable Trusts. He currently has a part time post-doc at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences – University of Washington, where he is focusing on using LiDAR to guide multiscale resilience management in the Sierra Nevada and Colville NF. He also teaches forest management classes at UW. He lives on Vashon Island where he works with the Vashon Forest Stewards; a community forestry group that manages forest operations for small private, non-industrial forest landowners
Presentation Topic
Forest Restoration in the Tablet & Smart Phone era: Marking and Realtime Monitoring using the ICO APP
Presentation Description
Incorporating spatial variability into forest restoration prescriptions has resulted in implementation challenges; primarily quantifying, marking, and monitoring desired levels of variability in treatments. These challenges are magnified with Designation by Prescription contracts. In addition, compliance monitoring of treatments typically occurs after units have been cut and so creates a lag time that slows collaborative learning and adaptive management. We present an Andriod APP that allows marking crews or operators to track and map progress towards prescription targets for both density and pattern in real time. The APP provides implementers, managers, and stakeholders immediate and transparent feedback on treatments, which facilitates more efficient implementation, monitoring, and adaptive adjustments. The APP is designed for ICO (Individuals, clumps, and openings) prescriptions, but can be adapted for basal area or other prescription approaches. It can also be used by stakeholders or others for multiparty monitoring.
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