Program Item Details
TITLE: Thomas Moore, President, Deep River, Ontario
SUBJECT: #235 SFMN Conference: Patchworks for Forest Planning
SYNOPSIS: ..
AUDIO: Download Audio (mp3 format)
TRANSCRIPT:
#235 May 19, 2007
Interview starts 23:20
Intro: Louisiana Pacific isn’t the only company using the computer modeling software called Patchworks. It’s a program that forest planners in industry and government have picked up all across the country. Patchworks has become an extremely useful tool that allows planners to look decades Into the future to see what current logging or tree planting will do to the forests of our grandchildren. Patchworks was developed by Thomas Moore, President of Spatial Planning Systems in Deep River Ontario.
Tom Moore
TM: Patchworks is a spatially explicit simulation modeling tool for forest planners.And it’s a bit of a new type of program that’s been enabled by faster computers and more expressive programming languages and better libraries for doing this kind of development. couldn’t have done this ten years ago. But now it’s becoming possible with better technology.
CC:NOW YOUR BACKGROUND IS AS A FORESTER. HOW DOES A FORESTER GET INTO COMPUTER MODELLING?
TM: Well I guess I went against the grain abit because most students choose to go into forestry because they hate math and the technical subjects and want to get out in the bush. But I had an aptitude for computer programming as an undergraduate and one of my first jobs was with the Canadian Forest Service taking a look at geographic information systems and compiling national inventory and doing a lot of work with computers and simulation models.
CC: NOW ONE OF THE THINGS IN PATCHWORKS WHEN YOU’RE DEALING WITH FOREST ISSUES, IT’S SO COMPLEX, THERE’S SO MANY DIFFERENT LAYERS OF INFORMATION THAT YOU HAVE TO PUT IN AND THE OTHER THING THAT I’VE LEARNED ABOUT DEALING WITH FORESTRY ISSUES IS THAT IF YOU DO ONE THING, IT MIGHT BE GOOD IN THIS AREA BUT NOT NECESSARILY SO GREAT IN ANOTHER. HOW DO YOU TAKE ALL OF THAT DIVERSITY AND PUT IT ALL TOGETHER INTO A PROGRAM THAT CAN ACTUALLY HELP PEOPLE?
TM: Well that’s the challenge and I guess it comes from a history of developing simulation models and learning some of the pitfalls along the way. So some of the first simulation models that I worked with were very specific and special purpose and designed for only one forest type.
And as I began developing simulation models, I was looking for ways to try and generalize and make them more broadly applicable. Patchworks has as a third or fourth generation tool, we tried to fully generalize it to make it as widely applicable as possible to different forest types, different silvicultre, different planning problems.
CC:NOW YOUR PRESENTATION TODAY, YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT HOW PATCHWORKS WAS USED BY LOUISANA-PACIFIC. CAN YOU GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE OF HOW THEY USED IT?
TM: Patchworks was used as an integration tool to try to being the research they had done in many different areas to bear, and give some insight into the impacts of some of their management programs. We were able to take research projects on hydrological function and biodiversity and the ecological land inventory and response to silviculture and the bird survey data and the synthesis of its results and try to bring it all into one package where we could examine the impact of different management strategies and how they would influence the outcome of a whole suite of indicators.
CC: WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AND THE PATCHWORKS PROGRAM?
TM: Well there’s always an R& D list that extends for two years. But there’s as many emerging issues in forestry that as soon as we feel we’ve been able to address one issue well, there’s another issue emerging around the corner. There’s no end to the challenges in store.
CC:DO YOU SEE APPLICATIONS OF THIS FOR OTHER INDUSTRIES?
TM: Oh certainly. But the field is just so large. Commentorial optimization techniques used in Patchworks come from the field of circuit design and circuit layout and they’d be equally applicable to other fields such as transportation, logistics planning as well.
CC:THANK YOU VERY MUCH THOMAS.
TM: Thank you
Tom Moore is President of Spatial Planning Systems in Deep River Ontario. He was a presenter at the recent Sustainable Forest Management Network Conference in Edmonton.