The Northeast Center for Urban and Community Forestry at Amherst, MA

The USDA Forest Service Northeast Center for Urban & Community Forestry, in cooperation with the City of Springfield, MA Parks Department have developed several freeware computerized tree inventory tools that work with Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's), utilizing the Palm® Operating System . Also, a Windows® desktop program for data management is availble for free download. The USDA Forest Service Northeast Center for Urban & Community Forestry is a technology transfer center of the Forest Service's Northeastern Area, State and Private Forestry. The Center located at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst.

For more information please contact:
David Bloniarz, USDA Forest Service at dbloniarz@fs.fed.us

  
   
Background
The Palm Operating System (OS), and the related Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) hardware, are providing the urban and community forester, tree wardens and consultants with a variety of new tools, which greatly increase the effectiveness of the professional tree manager. Whether it is record keeping, mapping or inventory work, PDA's and the Palm OS make fieldwork and record keeping much easier to compile, archive and retrieve.
Palm OS and Data Collection\Management
One of the areas that the Palm OS, and the PDA, have been most useful in assisting tree mangers is in the completing of tree inventories. Traditionally, these operations have relied on cumbersome paper tally sheets or expensive computerized data recorders. Today, the Palm OS is the preferred computer platform of many data collectors, and there are a variety of hardware options available for field use. Palm, Handspring and Sony are the most popular PDA's.
Palm OS Applications From the USDA Forest Service Northeast Center for Urban & Community Forestry
MCTI - Mobile Community Tree Inventory

The MCTI software has been developed as a desktop and PDA software package that provides a versatile tree inventory collection system for municipal tree managers. This public-domain program package, manual, and associated materials are available for free download and can be used by communities of varying sizes.

 

Site Last Updated 7-19-02
Pendragon Forms 3.1Inventory Templates
PDA programs can be customized for the individual user and field operation. Pendragon Forms 3.1 provides inexpensive, easy to use software for developing various data entry forms that a tree manger may use. Several templates related to urban and community forestry operations have been developed and are available for free download.