The Taiga Forest Carbon Project developed a High Resolution Forest Inventory Solution, over the treed portions of the Taiga forest. The area of interest reflected a total data coverage area of 81,497 hectares (200,869 acres). Situated south of Kapuskasing, Ontario, the Kapuskasing forestland property resides within Ontario’s Great Clay Belt boreal forest - Lake Abitibi Ecoregion 3E (mid-Boreal region).  

It contains large areas of primary forest – forestland that has never seen human harvest activities. The Taiga Forest Carbon Project will ensure that a vast expanse of the critical Clay Belt ecosystem remains protected from further industrial development, and will contribute to maintaining and locking away additional carbon during the project’s 100-year crediting period.

The forest is dominated by coniferous (softwood) tree species (black spruce, white spruce, balsam fir, jack pine, and tamarack). The predominant deciduous tree species are white birch, trembling aspen, and balsam poplar. Less frequent minor occurrences of coniferous tree species (e.g., eastern white pine, red pine and eastern white cedar) and deciduous tree species (e.g., american elm) tend to inhabit small isolated areas.

The project demonstrated the reliability of producing structural attribute estimates for standing trees at the gridcell scale (20m x 20m). It included age, diameters, heights, site indices, volumes and other attribute estimates at the microstand scale (with polygons generally ~0.2 hectares in size). HRIS provided the data attributes (over the treed area) required to support Perimeter Forest’ analysis, planning and management activities. 

See for yourself how Perimeter Forest was able to easily incorporate their HRIS inventory into an intuitive map viewer of their Taiga Forest project.