The iMapit app has been a godsend for my forestry project.
In the spring of 2021, I began stewarding a 28 acre forest in eastern Washington state. Initially, the land was totally unknown to me and barely accessible. It had no buildings or any human development. No access off the road, no water, no electricity, poor internet. My plan has been to make the place habitable and to reduce the danger of wildfire by trimming the pine trees and removing the bitterbrush undergrowth. Eventually, I want to plant a food forest and to practice permaculture on the land.
In order to consciously steward the land, I had to learn to find my way around it and to develop tools to collect and store the information that I gained. This is where the app was so useful in conjunction with Google Earth (GE). My first step before I even arrived on the land was to find it on GE and to collect all the information that I could through the internet. I drew the property boundaries and established a grid system of cells 200 feet on a side – 28 cells in all – identified by letters and numbers (A to E from west to east and 1 to 6 north to south) producing a unique label for each cell (A1, A2,… F6). See figure 1.
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| Figure 1a |
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| Figure 1b |
From GE I was able to determine the coordinates for each cell corner and when I arrived on the land I used iMapit to find the coordinates on the ground where I would put a stake with the cell identifier. The brush was thick enough that it was initially difficult to find the stakes after I put them in so I wrapped them in bright surveyor tape and used iMapit to find the coordinates. Without internet, I could not use GE software on-site so iMapit was my tool in the field.
Once I had the coordinate system in place, it became much easier to navigate around on the land and I began the fire hazard reduction work. I was approved for governmental matching funds for this work which meant that I needed to assure that I treated every tree in the project plot (initially eleven acres). A side benefit of careful documentation is that I could actually inventory the trees and determine how much timber is on the property. This information will eventually be important in developing a forest management plan. So, every time that I treated a tree I would label it with the cell number and tree number (A1-1, A1-2, etc.) and I would measure the girth, the height and the breast high circumference. Then I would use iMapit to mark the coordinates by dropping a pin in the app. At the end of the day, I would enter the coordinates for each tree with its data into GE with a pin for each tree. See figure 2.
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| Figure 2 |
Now, by the end of my second summer, I have the eleven acres finished and around 200 trees mapped in GE.
I have also used iMapit to gather other information about the property and to assist me in laying out berms, swales, trails, camping sites, and where I am planting fruit and nut trees. See figure 3.
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| Figure 3a |
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| Figure 3b |
I’ve used it to keep track of wildlife habitat piles I have built and interesting features I discover on the land. Always, iMapit has been my tool on my cell phone in the field and GE has been the tool on my computer for adding the information as I collect it. I have been very grateful for the support that I have received from Marcus as I had difficulty initially importing the data electronically from the app to GE. Marcus helped figure out that the issue had to do with my email program and with some special characters I was using in my data collection. He helped clean up my data so I could import it easily.
Article by: Steve / Washington
