Watershed Management

The sound management of watersheds is critical to maintaining water quality and supply and to reducing risk from floods. Our skills in hydrology, geomorphology, ecology, forestry and GIS allow us to create state-of-the-art geographically oriented watershed management tools that, among other things, allow managers to:

• Design riparian buffers that vary in size based on factors such as topography, vegetation type and soils.
• Pinpoint the upstream areas where vegetation clearance most severely contributes to degradation of downstream water quality.
• Determine where forest replanting and riparian restoration would most effectively contribute towards improving overall water quality.
• Analyze watershed runoff to help in planning for reservoir storage for flood prevention and water storage.

Forestry

A good GIS is essential for the efficient and competitive operation of a commercial forest in this day and age. Not only can GIS help forest managers generate long term returns on their investment, but it can help them do so in a way that is environmentally and aesthetically benign. SIG's consultants have years of experience in the management, ecology and economics of forests in both tropical and temperate ecosystems. This experience allows us to use GIS creatively and efficiently in addressing forest management problems. Our GIS tools can help forest managers to:

• Keep a spatial inventory that is easily updateable and that can be integrated with current computer growth models and forest management software.
• Use inventories, economic models and growth models to maximize the net present value of harvests subject to any user-defined constraints.
• Have detailed stand maps nested as sub-regions within less detailed landscape or forest-wide maps. This is a data-efficient way to maintain detail without redundancy and without having to load up enormous files every time.
• Integrate data from soils, topography, hydrography, vegetation and wildlife layers to minimize the environmental impact of any harvest operation.

Habitat Mapping

A forest manager wants to determine where to perform prescribed burns so as to create optimal habitat for a prized game species, but is limited on what type of land can be burned. A transportation agency needs to know whether the proposed route for a new highway goes through the habitat of an endangered songbird and if the alternative routes would significantly reduce the impact. A parks planning agency must determine a new park's boundaries so as to maximize contiguous habitat for a rare predator while minimizing the amount of private land purchased. These problems, once painstaking and labor-intensive to solve, can now be done quickly by integrating environmental science with GIS. SIG can design tools that allow habitat managers to:

• Map habitats for numerous different species at different spatial scales
• Pinpoint areas critical to the survival of keystone species or species assemblages and rank areas of secondary importance.
• Determine how existing and potential land uses might directly and indirectly impact habitats
• Choose the best parcels for protection, based on habitat quality, land uses and costs of acquisition.