Online app to visualize, interpret spatial data for forest planning and conservation

The Intelligent GeoSolutions (IGS) team at the University of Maine's Center for Research on Sustainable Forests (CRSF) has released a free interactive mapping tool, the Forest Ecosystem Status a … Trends (ForEST) app, to provide online decision support to private and public forest managers, natural resource agencies, conservation organizations and other stakeholders. With the current outbreak of eastern spruce budworm expanding south from Quebec, up-to-date information about resource conditions and near-term risk are needed to coordinate mitigation actions in response to the outbreak and related market conditions. The ForEST app is the culmination of three years of research and software development by the IGS team in partnership with UMaine's Advanced Computing Group. The interdisciplinary project supported two graduate students in the School of Computing and Information Science, each of whom served as lead developer, as well as undergraduate computer science students who worked as team programmers. The interactive web interface is designed to provide near real-time information about changing forest landscape conditions resulting from the spruce budworm outbreak and ongoing management.