Barbara Höck

Barbara Höck and Tim Payn, working with J. W. Shirley of Forestry Corporation, had 1,643 forest compartment boundaries in digital form and imported them into ARC/INFO. The compartment identifiers linked 744 known site-index values to the spatial data, while the GIS supplied compartment-centre coordinates to a geostatistical analysis and received the estimated values back for mapping. The job shows a step beyond computerised forest inventory: the forest's management units had become spatial objects that could connect inventory records, statistical estimation and map production.

A 1998 paper by Forest Research scientists Barbara Höck, Tim Payn and Andrew Dunningham shows what this looked like after the institute became a Crown Research Institute. Their work combined remote sensing, permanent sample plots, foliage measurements, soil-map units, GIS and geostatistics. One trial treated satellite pixels as 25-metre ground cells and tested them against measured forest data; another loaded growth and foliage plots into GIS and overlaid them with soil units while the team worked on a better link between MARVL and GIS. Forestry scientists used GIS to compare and analyse their information.