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INVESTIGATION OF A GIS FOREST BASE MAPPING PROCESS 
USING OPTICAL AND RADAR REMOTE SENSING: FIRST RESULTS 
Brian Davis 
MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. 
Woodlands Services Division 
65 Front Street 
Nanaimo, B.C. 
VIR 5H9 
Stéphane Rossignol 
Radarsat International Inc. 
3851 Shell Road, Suite 200 
Richmond, B.C. 
V6X 2W2 
Christine Hutton 
Canada Centre for Remote Sensing 
Natural Resources, Canada 
588 Booth Street 
Ottawa, Ontario 
K1A OY7 
ABSTRACT 
A technique was developed to integrate SPOT and simulated RADARSAT Fine Resolution 
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data into the MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. forest base map updating 
process. The project test site was located in the Queen Charlotte archipelago. Remote sensing 
data were corrected for terrain distortions and served to map new roads and cutblocks. The new 
features were added a GIS forest map based on the British Columbia 1:20,000 scale TRIM data. 
Much of MacMillan Bloedel’s tenure in coastal British Columbia is constantly hampered by cloud 
cover which prevents the acquisition of optical satellite data. RADARSAT imagery with its all 
weather capability is expected to be an important source of information for base map updating 
operations. Methodologies developed support the concept of a future operational forest map 
updating system using SPOT data where available, and RADARSAT SAR data in areas where 
optical data is non-existent. 
KEY WORDS: Remote Sensing, Synthetic Aperture Radar, SPOT, RADARSAT, ERS-1, DEM, GIS, 
Forest Base Mapping 
1. INTRODUCTION inaccurate by today’s standards. The original 
mapping sufficed for forest inventory 
The Geomatics Team of Woodlands Services purposes at the time but is no longer 
Division is responsible for the development adequate due to the more stringent 
and operation of MacMillan Bloedel Limited's requirements of a GIS and associated 
Geographic Information System (GIS) applications. 
including maintenance of the company’s 
largest mapbase, the forest inventory. The MacMillan Bloedel intends to replace the 
ARC/INFO GIS is used to manage the mapbase with digital, three-dimensional 
1:20,000 mapbase covering a combined area topographic data based on the North 
of approximately 1.4 million hectares. The American Datum 83 (NAD83) coordinate 
mapbase was created by manually digitizing system. The British Columbia government's 
hardcopy  planimetric maps that are TRIM mapping program (Province of British 
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