2018 WLIA Annual Conference

In the past decade the emergence of the Emerald Ash Borer has required many urban foresters to take preventative measures to stem the damage, often this requiring the removal of all healthy and unhealthy Ash trees. This has forced many foresters to turn to technology and GIS to help them maintain their trees. This presentation will focus on several Wisconsin communities and their approach to using GIS to maintain their tree canopy. The presentation will focus on two applications of GIS. First, it will focus on the use of Collector for ArcGIS. This application allows Forestry staff to not only record the geographic location of a tree but accurately provide attribute information about the tree such as its common name, diameter, condition, if it should be marked for removal, etc. Secondly, the presentation will focus on the use of an ArcGIS Web AppBuilder application that helps office workflows through the creation of various queries for Forestry Staff. The audience will take away an understanding of how GIS for forestry applications allows for more data driven answers allowing fast and accurate decision making. Forestry staff and other community decision makers will be able to incorporate a more diverse and robust data set for their data collection, tree maintenance, and reporting workflows.