Digital Forest Inventory Mapping

13,920 sq. km of Canadian forest land digitised and attributed with 100% automated consistency. A leading Canadian geospatial firm required a scalable digital forestry inventory to support wood-supply planning, ecosystem management and long-term environmental analysis across Newfoundland and Labrador. Existing manual GIS workflows created bottlenecks in attribution accuracy, turnaround time and operational cost — particularly across multi-vintage forest datasets spanning more than 1.3 million hectares.

Automated GIS workflows digitised 13,920 sq. km, improving forestry planning accuracy, reducing costs and enabling scalable environmental management operations.

Industry: Energy & Utilities

13,920 sq. km: Forest land digitised
16: Attributes automated per polygon
−40%+: Cost vs manual onshore workflows

Challenge

The project demanded engineering-grade forest inventory mapping under strict provincial delivery timelines and budget constraints. Thousands of polygons required precise attribution across 16 separate forestry variables including species, density and age classifications. Manual interpretation and data entry introduced significant risk of inconsistency, while fragmented GIS workflows slowed integration into downstream wood-supply planning systems.

Approach

SBL Infotech deployed MMS — its Managed Media Services platform — to govern the complete forest inventory workflow from ortho-photo interpretation through spatial database delivery. A dedicated GIS production team worked alongside certified Canadian foresters to execute large-scale photo interpretation, CAD digitisation and multi-vintage analysis across 2010 and 2011 datasets. Automated in-house scripts incorporated and validated 16 unique attributes per polygon, eliminating manual entry inconsistencies and maintaining topology integrity across all deliverables. Final outputs were delivered as Esri-compatible shapefiles, enabling immediate integration into provincial forestry and ecosystem management systems.

Outcome

What began as a labour-intensive mapping exercise evolved into a repeatable digital forestry operating model. The client gained a scalable inventory platform capable of supporting selective harvesting analysis, predictive wood-supply modelling and long-term conservation planning across millions of hectares. The new workflow reduced operational dependency on fragmented manual GIS processes, accelerated turnaround cycles and established a reusable framework for future natural-resource mapping initiatives across regions and jurisdictions.

IX Case studies

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