Geographic Information System in Forestry: Practices, Problems and Prospects

Forest management decisions are made based on spatial-temporal information about both current and future forest resource conditions. It is a big challenge to track and project changes in forests, a long-lived dynamics biological systems, that are continuously changing. The uncertainties and complexes in managing the forests over time demand for more useful and timely information. So spatial-temporal information becomes the cornerstone of effective forest management decision-making. Traditional techniques cannot be used to solve sophisticated problems of forest planning and management at large spatial scales. Geographical Information System (GIS), the com puter-based analytic toolbox for quantitatively modeling of spatial relationships and mapping system, plays an important role in providing the comprehensive spatial information for forest management.This paper review s the current literature regarding GIS applications in forest planning and management, and discusses benefits, problems and limitations of GIS in forest practices.Furthermore, recent progress and future development in integrating G IS with other spatial technologies such as Remote Sensing (RS), Global Position System (GPS), and modeling approaches including artificial neural networks and forest simulation models into forest decision support systems are also discussed.