SmartForestTools

SmartForestTools is a forest-management GIS app from Umweltdata GmbH for foresters and forest enterprises that need current, detailed stand data in the field. Each tablet stores the customer's forest geodata (orthophotos, airborne laser-scanning layers, forest maps, cadastral parcels, contour lines and roads), so the app also works offline. Field edits synchronise through a shared cloud with desktop workstations, with conflict detection when several users work in one project.

In the forest, users record harvesting, tending and calamity measures, draw and measure areas, and survey or stake out points with the device's satellite positioning (GPS/GNSS), using averaged measurements when higher accuracy is needed; photos and documents are geolocated, and an SOS function supports field safety. Stand attributes are calculated in real time to support management decisions, and maps, PDF reports, shapefiles and Excel tables can be exported.

The app is the field front end of Umweltdata's Forest Point Cloud, a single-tree representation built from airborne, drone and terrestrial laser scans: planning polygons inherit tree and stand attributes from it automatically. Umweltdata states the point cloud is updated regularly and automatically by remote sensing. Its 2018 SmartForestTools workshop names the federal aerial survey flown every three years (orthophotos and an image-matching surface model) and change detection as the basis of data updating, and shows Sentinel-2 imagery, available every five days, revealing new forest roads and fellings; its current input diagram lists change detection from satellite images as an input. Umweltdata states that the practical suitability of the approach has been demonstrated across entire federal states and in numerous forest enterprises. The app-store listing names Windows, Android and iOS versions; the app is documented in an 82-page user manual and a series of video tutorials.