Plotting trees on a map

[headgroundsman]

Just read this thread and was interested in your comment about being paralysed in a car accident. I too was paralysed T7 when I rolled my landrover on a main road 12 years ago. Just bought some land within the National forest area and will be planting it up with some trees with their help. I use a manual wheelchair which is towed by a Swiss Trac. Google it if you don't know what it is!. It would be good to catch up sometime.

[Ben Rose]

Hi woodnicer,

 

This is quite easy to do if you have the right software. I would be happy to help you if you would like me to.

 

The best method would be to purchase a digital OS basemap from a supplier such as Promap (or similar). You can then map the trees with a hand held GPS (these cost about £100), or plot them by eye on the map. There is lots of software that could do this but I use Pear Technology PT Mapper Pro. A cheaper alternative to buying the OS basemap would be to mark out the site boundary in Google Earth, export it as a KML file, and then map the trees in PT Mapper Pro.

 

Then, if you have measured the girths of the trees and would like these indicated on the plans I would export it to AutoCAD and then map the trees with ArborCAD. This would automatically illustrate the girths of the trees. Also, of you measure crown spreads you can also plot these on the map. The finished maps can look quite good.

 

If you were to buy all of the software it would be pretty expensive. But its not much work. If you plotted the trees I could produce the maps that you are hoping for in a couple of hours. You are welcome to contact me if you wanted to do that.

 

Ben

[bluebedouin]

I want to plot all oaks in my woodland on a map along with the girth of each tree. It’s more to leave for future generations really although it would be interesting to be able to see where the trees are on a map to plan for lanting and thinning.

 

Do any members know of softwhere that could help or is a compass and measuring wheel the best way forward.

 

There's a website called zeemaps that you could do this on.

You can add pinpoint markers with descriptions.

I've made a quick demo one here.

[10 Bears]

Not trying to resurrect an old thread - but I realised I hadn't posted any further info on the code/analysis I wrote, so here are a few images and description of the method:

 

Step one: read in the base image

[10 Bears]

Step two: Convert from RGB into LAB:

[10 Bears]

Step Three: Segment colours using K-means

[10 Bears]

Step Four: Generate pixel indexing

[10 Bears]

Step Five: Create new image from the previous segments

[10 Bears]

Step Six: Identify segmented colour centres

[10 Bears]

Now step six should have shown the 'map' of segmented colour locations. As you can see step five and six are very dark, and by looking at the histogram of the images - there is almost no colour separation at all, and the K-means only identified 12 individual groups.

 

So, all in, this should have worked - but the original image (from Google maps) was too saturated to see great differences and therefore identify the unique tree locations.

 

When I have more time (which is not now!), I may have a look at improving the sensitivity of stages five and six.

 

So, there you are, it worked. Sort of...