Trestima – Digital Photographs for Forest Inventory

Higher efficiency of forest survey is a corner stone of forest inventory and forest planning. Mobile technologies create a unique opportunity to solve the problem as well as measurement accuracy improvement, higher data objectiveness and independent control of the results. Trestima technology bases on extraction of forest attributes such as basal area, tree stem diameter, tree height and species distribution from photographs captured by a mobile phone. Image processing is performed automatically in a cloud service using machine vision, which is aided by a human operator when necessary. That allows automating all further calculations. Functions of electronic compass and geopositioning implemented on modern smart-phones allows registering the direction as well as sufficiently accurate geographic coordinates, which enables unambiguously association of a measurement and its location. The service produces reports about timber stock, basal area, average diameter, average height, number of tree trunks and diameter distribution. The report prepared for each tree stand includes standard error, as well as confidence interval for the measurements results and the assessment, with a 95 % probability level. Using thecross-section area, the average diameter and average height, the timber stock and the number of stems in the specific area may be calculated. The report generated by Trestima can be easily supplemented by a derived parameters, as well as any of the applicable formulas can be easily modified or altered in accordance with the needs, for example, dependingon the particularforest inventory area. One of the key features of the Trestima technology is the fact that each measurement contains geographic coordinates’ data. It means that, the location of eachmeasurementcan be displayedon the map, and the route, and the area cover under consideration can be analyzed