We've made some major changes to the Great Lakes Silviculture Library. A key change has been making the map a larger focus on the site: it is now easier to see prescriptions in your work area for different cover types, forest health threats, and silviculture systems. Existing users will note that we kept the familiar cover type grid, but we added new ways to search and filter case studies - such as site preparation method and climate change adaptation strategy - and expanded the selection of forest health threats. Tutorial videos to help ease the transition are currently being edited and will be published on the SFEC YouTube channel in the coming days. Read on for more detailed update notes.
Homepage
- Emphasized the map for all cases; find cases in your work area, or fill in any geographic gaps with your own prescriptions
- Recently published or updated case studies will now be displayed on the homepage
- Core searching keywords of cover type, forest health threat, and silviculture system each have their own page; the map snapshot for each of these groups updates to show respective case studies
Exploring Case Studies
- We have fully integrated forested MN ECS and Kotar habitat types with a goal of improving searchability and usability for our users in Wisconsin and Michigan; again, if you see gaps and note that, say, PQG could use more than two case studies, we wholeheartedly encourage you to fill those gaps with your work
- In addition to the familiar cover type, forest health threat, and silviculture system, you can now filter cases using a variety of terms, including
- Adaptive Silviculture: find cases that manage with resistance, resilience, or transition strategies, defined in the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change framework
- Site preparation method: we have everything except dragging an old tractor frame behind a skidder (though we'd probably list that under "scarification")
- Soil texture: the whole soil texture triangle, plus muck and peat
- Forest health threat: we now have 17 popular forest health threats; this larger expansion means lots of gaps for the new terms, and we'd strongly encourage folks post their work relating to managing or mitigating different threats
- Cover type and silviculture system remain unchanged
Case Study Submission
- We've drastically simplified the workflow thanks to improvements to the site interface; case study authors can fill out a Google form with the stand information and then draft their case study entirely in the linked Word template on the site before sending the final document to us for review. We're looking at potential author account solutions, but as it stands all cases will be routed through SFEC via the Google form and template, rather than your author workbench.
- The template has been updated
- Photos can be directly integrated wherever it makes sense to insert them, rather than putting them at the end
- Improved table functionality, allowing authors to copy and paste into the Word template from programs such as Excel rather than re-entering their table data into the website
- Multiple stand entries as part of a treatment are now explicitly supported, contributing to the consistency between case studies and attempting to minimize confusion for authors
- We are developing tutorials for generic federal, state, and county prescription documents in an effort to demonstrate where existing information and data can be directly copied and pasted into the template in an attempt to ease real and perceived time commitments associated with creating case studies, particularly among first- and second-time authors