Counting "Toothpicks" with Windows Mobile

Editor's Note: Jim Moore consults for TDS, whose products are described in this article.

Counting toothpicks

Imagine you've just dropped the world's biggest box of wooden toothpicks. Now your job is to count them all. This is a very big box; we're talking about millions of toothpicks. How would you count them? You could measure off a small section of them, count those, and then extrapolate the result to the entire group. This is a rough parallel to the way the forest industry works to estimate its inventory. Thanks to a forward-thinking partnership between forestry experts and technology developers (and Windows Mobile), the ability to get an efficient and accurate count on virtually any forest plot has markedly progressed in just the past few years.

Getting an accurate inventory of a forest plot has never been easy. For decades, hardy men called "cruisers" have tromped through the woods and used their specialized skills to deliver species and tree counts. For most of that time, they used hand-sketched maps or grid paper over aerial photos, plotting forests and then doing the hard work on the ground, using a string box to pace off distances on the ground based on a 2x5 grid system. Using a compass to help get their bearings, they would step off straight-line distances between plots.

A "cruiser" wanders through a forest, gathering the information needed to estimate the amount and type of timber and timber products that the forest contains.

This approach has two major obstacles. One is that the cruiser has to walk straight no matter what the terrain or vegetation is like. The other is that it's nearly impossible to walk off distances in a forest with complete accuracy. And over a large tract, any inaccuracy is magnified. If a cruiser is off by just five feet on the first plot, that throws off the second plot, and so on. The cumulative error over the tract can be significant. Volume is the key to value, and precision affects volume.

Of course, the industry has attempted to use technology to improve this process. The introduction of handheld computers seemed like a good step in field computations. But over time, handheld users have grown frustrated by the limitations of both cumbersome DOS-based software and of handhelds that don't hold up well in the rugged conditions in the woods. And early attempts to use GPS have proved troublesome.

But technology develops rapidly today. All it took for a quantum leap in forest inventorying capabilities was a fortuitous piece of timing and two partners with complementary knowledge.

Applying mobile technology to the problem

LandMark Systems is a natural resource-based corporation located in the Southeast. With deep experience in the forestry industry and a strong interest in technology, they began working several years ago to develop a better solution for accurate inventorying. As part of their research efforts they came across a Northwest-based company called Tripod Data Systems (TDS), which had developed highly successful software and hardware solutions for in-the-field markets such as land surveying. TDS was interested in the forestry market, and LandMark was interested in TDS products. They decided to get together and use the resulting synergy to create solutions.

"It was a natural partnerships," says Brian Holley of LandMark. "We had limited technology experience, and TDS had limited forest industry experience. It was a perfect pairing, and we came together to develop RTI."

Real-Time Inventory (RTI) is a system that combines a rugged handheld computer, a customized version of TDS's SOLO Field software, a forestry-software program called TCruise, and cutting-edge GPS capabilities—to deliver a highly advanced data collection and mapping solution in one physically compact package.

The Real-Time Inventory system runs on a rugged Windows Mobile device, and gives cruisers the ability to survey forests easier, faster, and more accurately.