Plum Creek takes an active role in protecting the land against erosion, maintains areas for recreation, preserves landscape aesthetics and provides natural habitat for wildlife.

Submitted by Paige Medlin (Paige@uclid.com), UCLID Software (www.uclid.com), December, 2003

Plum Creek Timber manages 8 million acres of forest, making it the second largest private timberland owner in the United States. Plum Creek’s holdings are located in the northwest, spread across the south and even up the east coast from Texas into Pennsylvania. The forests are filled with a rich mix of Douglas fir, hemlock, pine, spruce and cedar. As a steward of land management, Plum Creek takes an active role in protecting the land against erosion, maintains areas for recreation, preserves landscape aesthetics and provides natural habitat for wildlife.

In addition to owning and managing timberlands, Plum Creek also manufactures wood products, develops real estate and even operates a coalmine in West Virginia. Their nine mills in Montana turn out high performance plywood and lumber that is a favorite of do-it-yourself homebuilders. Always mindful of reducing waste, residuals of lumber and plywood production are used to produce Medium Density Fiberboard –homogeneous panels for furniture components and cabinet doors.

Plum Creek has identified a select portion of lands which it is making available for sale or exchange to federal, state, and local governments, non-profit conservation organizations, and private investors. This keeps Plum Creek Land Company humming with Real Estate acquisitions and divestitures.

In addition to managing a diverse set of business endeavors, Plum Creek operates at the forefront of forestry science. It is a leader in sustainable forestry, the practice of managing forests in a sustainable, socially responsible, economical manner. Choices made by foresters have an impact on air quality, ecology, water quality, soil conservation and fish and wildlife resources. In addition to caring for the environment, Plum Creek also employs a research team to scientifically analyze and develop new forestry techniques.

Scientific accomplishments and environmental practices have earned Plum Creek accolades from government leaders, the national media and environmentalists. Plum Creek has exceeded a host of expectations. Successful in business, it has advanced forestry science and built a solid reputation as an organization that cares for the environment. There is a link between Plum Creek’s accomplishments and its use of state of the art technology.

Foresters are faced with weighty decisions – their choices impact the company’s bottom line as well as the natural environment. To make these decisions, they evaluate 2 important factors: adjacency and history. Adjacency refers to neighboring lands, for example a forester would not clear cut land that borders a stream or wildlife area. The history of a timber stand includes when it was seeded and fertilized and when it is scheduled for harvesting. Tracking this history helps to keep reforestation and harvesting on schedule and increases efficiency.

With so many details to track spatially and temporally, GIS is a natural fit for forestry. John Vona, Senior GIS Analyst for Plum Creek Timber, oversees the Integrated Forest Management System (IFMS) a desktop GIS application that allows foresters to manage and analyze volumes of timberland data. IFMS was built in 1997 with ESRI ArcInfo and Avenue scripts; the data is stored in an Oracle database. Using IFMS, a forester can quickly run a query and map the areas that are due for fertilization or planting. Or users can simply select a timber stand to review its history and what is planned for the future.

Current, accurate data is the lifeblood of a GIS. Field crews are responsible for recording information and this is primarily done using ArcPad. Data is entered from the field and then uploaded to the database. This saves time, as no one needs to transcribe field notes and there is no lag between recording the data and updating the database. An up-to-date database is essential for producing accurate reports based on reliable information.

The volumes of data entered by foresters in the field are incredibly valuable to executives in the boardroom. The office of Corporate and Operations Support analyzes costs and efficiencies in order to achieve maximum timber growth and financial returns. Analysts use IFMS to generate reports on the costs of planting, fertilizing and harvesting. Harvest schedules are a key part of revenue equations. Thanks to the tabular data stored in IFMS, management has a handle on cash flow and revenue projections.

While foresters concern themselves with harvest planning, the accountants focus on tax planning. Since 1999 the company has operated as a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) combining the capital of many investors for the purpose of acquiring and owning real estate such as timberlands. Because Plum Creek derives most of its income from the sale of timber, which is treated as capital gain income, rigorous accounting guidelines apply– guidelines which required Vona to re-create the parcel layer of the GIS.

In January 2003, Vona received a mandate from the Accounting department: reconcile the GIS acres with the legal records of land sales. Plum Creek’s Real Estate division certainly stays busy “small parcels of land are constantly changing hands,” says Vona. Plum Creek frequently encounters requests from the Highway Department for a five-acre right-of-way but they also have 20,000 acre land sales. Whether selling to government or private individuals, each sale has a property legal description associated with it. What Accounting needed, were maps of these legal descriptions.

Vona’s first step was to gather the legal descriptions for all of the land sales since 2001. Not surprisingly, the stack was nearly a foot high. With enough legals to exhaust any mapper, Vona was concerned about the amount of time he’d need to dedicate to the project. Although Vona is experienced in COGO, he realized that if he had to hand key this stack of legals “I’d end up pulling my hair out.” The prospect of spending a month mapping the legals did not appeal to Vona.

Vona read about IcoMap in Spatial News – an email newsletter distributed by the GeoCommunity. Developed by UCLID Software, IcoMap is a parcel mapping extension for ESRI ArcGIS that increases parcel mapping productivity by 84% for the average user. IcoMap has a solid ten-key COGO package, but what appealed to Vona was IcoMap’s ability to convert scanned documents into ArcGIS features.

Vona scanned his stack of property legal descriptions and then used IcoMap to create the parcel geometry. The survey measurements are used to create the linework, so the result is COGO-accurate. However, because IcoMap uses a point and click interface, the process is much faster than keying the data. “IcoMap saved our bacon,” said Vona. “I thought it would take me a month, instead it took me about a week.”

In the end, 200 parcels were cut out of Plum Creek’s land base. Vona was glad he chose IcoMap. “It was bug free, easy to learn and everyone is happy with the results.” While the in-house GIS application IFMS is indispensable to Plum Creek, new technologies are helping the GIS department be more productive. And who would have thought that GIS tools would enable Accounting to satisfy an important IRS requirement.

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