smojo wrote:It is very impressive and covers both the mapping and stats we were talking about smojo, I'd like to know exactly how he went about mapping each slice.
Wow that is so cool, would love a map of my wood like that. Gives you something to plan and play with back home. 8 days to complete eh? Yes sometimes the only way to do something properly is the manual slog. How about inviting him to our woods for some practice
Thank you both. No I probably won't be repeating that exercise ever again. I'd have to try a GPS/electronic alternative..
I scaled up a small outline of our wood (from the land registry map) onto pieces of A4 grid paper which I eventually sellotaped together (8 sheets in all). It's got to be big enough that you can mark each tree of course. Then I worked out how many grid squares were in a metre etc. Decided that 30 meters was a good area to cover in a day (although I managed to cover two such sections most days), and marked those areas on the grid paper.
Went to hobby craft shop and bought two packs of cheap felt tip pens - the kind with many different colours in them. I needed two packs because I managed to lose the odd pen as I walked around (still finding them in the undergrowth to this day LOL). Worked out a colour scheme/key... Pink = Hawthorn, Blue = Oak etc. Small dot = uncoppiced tree, Large dot = coppiced / multi-stem tree etc.
Here's the blank map sections and 'key' all prepared...
Also bought several balls of string. Went to the wood and measured out a 30 metre piece of string. Used that to work out where to run the lateral pieces of string, at chest height, to contain the next area to be mapped - had to be careful of orientation here ; what felt like a straight line west to east actually wasn't so I had to run them a bit diagonally to match up with the map. (Guess a compass would have been handy in hindsight). Then it's a case of walking up and down and marking the dots. Keeping track of which trees you'd done and which you haven't can be a challenge .. tree-blindness can set in ... try and use the natural groupings of trees and land features to keep track of it all. Sometimes I'd misjudge things and end up with too many trees and not really enough space on the grid to fit them in ( it's not necessary to be so accurate though ) but eventually I got a feel for where I was on the grid and this became less a problem. The 30 metre spacing worked well because in the middle of each section I could still just about see the strings through the undergrowth and orientate myself.
I used a large piece of board on which I pegged the current section of map and had a little box velcro'ed to it containing the colour pens...
We have four and half acres and that was enough (I notice that Outeredge's wood is similar size ). I was starting to go a bit bonkers, literally dotty, at the end of it and remember marking the last tree in the far corner and feeling both a sense of achievement and sadness that I had no more trees left! (There is another 50 acres of woodland adjoining ours and I had a fleeting thought to just keep on mapping .. they could bring me out in a straightjacket three months later
)
Once done, it was just a case of tidying it all up at home, scanning the parts into the computer and stitching them together with Gimp , or similar. I ended up with a 124Mb, 3400x9352 bitmap file , which could then be scaled down to more usable sizes...
This is a good time of year to do a survey, when it's easier to identify different species, and for me it was like a little holiday... a week outside in the nice weather, stopping to cook up lunch and cups of tea when I wanted a break, plenty of good music on the MP3 player to keep me going...
I would recommend any new wood owner doing some kind of survey of their wood ( maybe not as "OCD" as mine though! ) because you can learn so much about the different species you have and which parts of your woodland they like the most, and the reasons why...
by Wendelspanswick » Wed Jun 11, 2014 9:56 pm 
