GaiaStudio - Forest management platform http://GaiaStudio.ca
GaiaStudio Software Inc. is a BC-based company that provides an inexpensive, automated, and user-friendly modeling software solution for forest management planning, serving the different stakeholders involved with the impact of changes in forest landscapes as well as policy makers. The solution is delivered as a cloud-based service allowing access from a web-browser to GIS databases, stand-level forest models, and landscape-level management optimization. Such service eliminates the need for expensive long-term projects of landscape-level modelling and provides inexpensive on-the-fly solution to decision makers and stakeholders.
GaiaStudio’s platform combines the following essential elements:
- Completely automated solution that can be handled by non-modellers and a semi-automated solution for professional modellers
- Visualization of GIS data as maps, graphs, and 3D forests on the landscape
- Serves as storage server for GIS and other related data
- Simulation platform for landscape dynamics
- Management optimization tool to facilitate planning decisions
- Tool for public consultations and for dialog among stakeholders
- Allows collaboration among employees of the same organization and collaboration among different organizations that operate in the same geographical zone.
- Provides an API for programming projects to allow usage of GaiaStudio capabilities for non-standard modeling
Managing large landscape is a difficult task that requires careful planning, setting achievable goals against a set of constraints related to the area. Projecting the state of the landscape in the future is a major aim allowing a full understanding of expected socio-economic benefits resulting from each management scenario. Such projections are done today using landscape-level models that incorporate the complexity of the geographical data, the ability to predict forest-growth and impacts of natural disturbances, and the ability to predict locations of optimal harvest, in the framework of assigned goals and constraints. These models are difficult to operate due to the complexity of the algorithms and the amount of operational data. Only expert modellers use such tools professionally with an adequate accuracy and their work translates in a long-term project to setup a modelling run and for its analysis. As a consequence, usage of traditional modelling methods requires significant funding to sustain the duration of a modelling project.
GaiaStudio achieves the same goal with only a tiny fraction of the traditional project time and funding.