Farm Forestry New ZealandTree planter's record system
Euan Mason, New Zealand Tree Grower May 2005.
Tree planters record system (TPRS) software has been developed by the Farm Forestry Association with the support of the Sustainable Farming Fund. This software aids record keeping while ensuring that decision tools can use the stored records.
A particularly useful feature for NZFFA members is the facility to implement and analyse your own forest inventory with help from TPRS. A full set of simple instructions are available as a series of web pages that will lead you through an inventory. This facility will provide stem volume estimates for your woodlot.
TPRS allows small woodlot owners to record important details about tree planting on their properties. These records can then be fed to decision-support packages dubbed plugins in the system, that help with a variety of decisions.
The system acts as a journal, and allows people to associate pictures, spreadsheets and other documents with their tree planting activities. Records are arranged in a hierarchy, from district down to features of stands. Users first select their district, and then within districts they can record properties, paddocks within properties, stands and trees within paddocks, and so on. For each of these levels they can specify relevant details, such as the fields shown for stands as shown above, or associate images, spreadsheets and other documents with those records as shown below.
Records can be attached to items in the system in the form of pictures, spreadsheets , or other documents.
Plugins are designed to work at different levels. Growth and yield models, for instance, work at a stand level, while district council regulations (only high country districts are available at present) are displayed at a district level. Plugins are available for both of these functions, as well as species choice for stands in high country districts, a wilding risk estimator, and an inventory calculator package. Any programmer can create plugins that the record system can support, and developers of the core system do not intend to build an entire suite of plugins themselves. If users want a particular plugin tool, then they can have it developed by making a contribution towards development costs.
The inventory calculator plugin automatically detects the right kind of analysis for a forest inventory. It can handle fixed plots, point sample plots, simple random inventories and stratified random inventories.
The system can be downloaded and installed automatically from the web, and it is currently provided free of charge. Users need to have installed version 5.0 of the Java run time engine (JRE), and simple instructions for this are available on the projects web site. Any updated versions are installed automatically if the record system is started while the user's computer is attached to the web.
The first release version is available now.
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Post from Euan Mason on December 17, 2018 at 2:55PM
The TPRS software is now outdated and will not run on modern operating systems. It has not been funded for over a decade and would need plenty of funding for an upgrade.
The lasting impact of that SFF project, that was part of TPRS and is now implemented on-line, is a species choice decision-support system. You can link to it at:
http://www.treesandstars.com/euan/sppchc/
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