Forest maps were produced for the Forestry Department web-site. For all countries a locator map was produced and for the 116 (sub-)tropical countries currently available in the FORIS database of the FRA Programme an additional map was produced with forest cover.
The maps were produced in a semi-automatic fashion using the FRA Programme GIS facility. The routines that were developed for the production of the maps allow for easy adaptation and can be used for the production of other similar maps as well. For the countries not included in FORIS an inventory was made of comparable official forest cover maps publicly available on the Internet. Such officially endorsed maps were not found, although there are reliable sources of maps of forest cover lacking official endorsement.
This is the final report of the consultancy of the Geographic Information Expert For Support of the Forestry Department Information System on Forests, January - March 1999. The main purpose of the assignment was to produce maps of countries (locator maps) and their forest cover (forest cover maps) for inclusion in the new web site of the Forestry Department. The Terms of Reference for this consultancy are listed in Appendix 1. All of the tasks listed in the Terms of Reference have been completed, with the exception of reporting for FRA2000. This was due to the fact that no clear indication was given about the requirements for map products in FRA2000 reports. However, the automated procedures developed for the production of the locator and forest cover maps can easily be adjusted to support a wider range of mapping requirements, both in content and design.
The Forest Resources Information System (FORIS) of the Forest Resources Assessment Programme (FRA) served as the main source of data that was used to produce the maps. The automated procedures have been set up such that the work can be easily reproduced or adapted to new requirements. It can easily be integrated in the current data structures as they are being developed now in the framework of FRA (i.e. reporting for FRA2000).
This report is a technical resume of the work done. It contains a detailed description of the processing steps and the key routines that were used in the automation of the production of the maps are listed in Appendix 2.
For this assignment the consultant worked intensively with the Forestry Department web project manager, Gary Bull, and the web site programmer, Joerg Messer. There were regular meetings with the Project Director, Peter Holmgren, and the Senior Forestry Officer, Robert Davis, on the content of the maps. Most of the work has been performed on the GIS workstation of FRA, with the assistance of Massimiliano Lorenzini and George Mu'Ammar.
The consultant started working on an inventory of the available data in December. In January the first batch of locator maps was produced, after an iterative process of design, in consultation with the Forestry Department web site project manager, the web page designer and the programmer. Due to time constraints the complete set of locator maps as they were first published on the web page were fairly simple and of a rather inferior graphical quality (JPG instead of GIF). In March a second complete set of locator maps was produced of much improved graphical quality (GIF) and applying a production process that is automatic for most countries and straightforward for the others. This second set of locator maps uses an on-the-fly projection adequate for the country in question. This has proven to be particularly beneficial for countries in the higher latitudes (e.g. Canada, the Russian Federation, the Falkland Islands).
In February the consultant produced the forest cover maps for the (sub-)tropical countries for which FORIS contains the data. The maps were produced in a process comparable to that of the production of the locator maps, although the organization of the GIS component of FORIS has made automation cumbersome. Therefore, a semi-automatic procedure was developed which extracts the required data automatically from a set of especially prepared base layers and the forest cover from FORIS. From these country-specific layers the forest cover map was produced in ArcView, using automatic map building, with some manual editing to be done. The graphics have been prepared according to the specifications given by the graphics designer of the web site project.
The FRA Project Director and the FRA Senior Forestry Officer decided not to include any forest cover data from sources not explicitly controlled or endorsed by FRA. Instead, links were included in the web page referring the user to (national) sites with relevant data. The consultant has verified those links.
