Development of FVSOntario: A Forest Vegetation Simulator Variant and application software for Ontario

The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources is leading a government-industry partnership to develop an Ontario variant of the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS). Based on the Lake States variant and the Prognosis(BC) user-interface, the FVSOntario project is motivated by a need to model the impacts of intensive forest management strategies and the multiple ecological and social objectives faced by today's resource managers. Currently, the large tree diameter model and the small tree height model of the Lake States variant have been replaced with localized equations from data sets from the Great Lakes and Boreal forest zones of the province. A companion application, "Tree List Manager" has also been created to develop FVS tree-lists from the data collected through various field-cruising methods. Current efforts with the model involve the identification of equation weaknesses, improvement of user control on silvicultural treatments, and development of methods for populating stand species- and diameter-distributions for inventory polygons through enhanced forest inventory attribution using high resolution digital imagery combined with LiDAR and Individual Tree Crown classification approaches.