Traditionally, the Forestry and Peatlands Branch, through its Inventory and Analysis
section has been using the Forest Resources Inventory (FRI) system for recording,
analyzing and storing Manitoba forest information. Whereas this FRI system provides
information relevant to sustainable forest management and the forest industry, it lacks
additional forest information that can be useful in other resource management such
as wildlife habitat, non-timber forest products and values, etc.
The imagery, four band (RGB NIR) 30 cm ground sample distance (GSD), will be
required to produce a Forest Lands Inventory product for the option licence area and
the remaining areas will be used to determine harvest area boundaries, compliance
to harvest requirements and provide planning opportunities for forest operations.
Figures 1 and 2 indicate the areas within Manitoba that have been identified for
acquisition. Appendix A, Section 1 – “Geographic Extent” illustrates the division of the
areas for capture.
A spatial dataset representing the areas indicated in Figure 1 and Figure 2 can be
made available to interested parties for download; the data is in ArcGIS file
geodatabase format.
The Forestry and Peatlands Branch is currently working towards expanding this
approach across all the forested landscape of Manitoba. Acquire inventory quality
imagery for the Option Licence area as Provincial in-kind support and to create a new
forest inventory product. By adding in forest operations compliance imagery
requirements we anticipate cost savings related to deductions in project management
and project start-up costs as well as economies of scale realization.
