The 10-meter SiteGrid Method – Technical Workbook (PDF)
By Dan Opalach, PhD
This workbook covers the 10m SiteGrid method; an advanced, yet practical, approach to estimating site productivity. The method relates measures of site index to environmental factors such as precipitation, growing season days, and soil depth. Plus it requires less field work and is less expensive than traditional site index methods. And it can be easily incorporated into FPS.
While traditional site index methodology has been around for over 100 years, it requires lots of field work and the site index curves are rigid and do not take into account the broad range of stand and site conditions under which trees are currently grown: small clearcuts, lots of tree retention, various levels of vegetation management, and selection silviculture.
This workbook covers the field procedures for collecting the site indices data, building a forest-wide 10m SiteGrid GIS layer and assigning a forest-wide site capacity in FPS.