Shaffer Gives Talk on Sustainable Forest Management Practices

GIS Manager and Instructor of Environmental Science Chris Shaffer gave a talk titled “Sustainable Forest Management Practices: Identification and Prioritization of Forest Landowners in NWPA for Targeted Outreach Campaign” at the 2014 Northwest Pennsylvania Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Conference at Clarion University of Pennsylvania on October 16. This conference showcases how GIS, GPS, and remote sensing are used by governments, professionals, and educators to transform spatial data into information used to support decision-making. Shaffer’s project for the Foundation for Sustainable Forests (FFSF) used GIS to identify landowners meeting specific criteria such as proximity to existing FFSF-managed land, protected lands, high-value ecosystems, Audubon Important Bird Area (IBA) forest blocks, the French Creek drainage basin, minimum size and overall shape of timber stands, and current place of residence. The analysis was conducted for Crawford, Erie, Venango, and Warren counties and has since been expanded to include Mercer County as part of a class research project in Shaffer’s ENVSC 305: Environmental Spatial Analysis course this fall. Students attending the conference included Mikki Baxter ’15, Klancey Burford ’16, Tim Cornett ’16, Ian Johnson ’17, Jamie Moran ’15, Xuewei Ni ’17, and Derek Reno ’16.