Time line and other questions for tropical situations

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hdelaconcha
Posts: 50
Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2016 8:10 pm
Location: Mexico
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Time line and other questions for tropical situations

Post by hdelaconcha » Mon Dec 05, 2016 11:59 am

First thanks for letting me know about the timeline for my Merida Project, It seems it will work out fine since the data gathering is turning out a bit slower than we thought. I want to do a trial run with 2 of the 8 strata finished to practice and see the information how it is handled. For these I situtated the project in FLA, since Merida is also a city close to the Gulf of Mex, I know the pollution info will not apply but I want to see the inventory and tree info. First is there any problem with this trial, do you have any recomendations on what to check in the data before sending them?? I am reviewing the data for missing values, or any strange number, but anything else?

Since it is a tropical city there are a lot of Palms in the area, and we have had some discussion regarding the evaluation of crown condition in palms. I have not seen any guidelines for it we are basically giving the a "good" status with condition 90-95 and 95-99% most of the time because they look good. SO basically the question is how relevant is for the whole project an overestimation of a Palm crown condition? or how should we estimate it more precisely??

Thanks again
Horacio de la Concha
AGRINET SA de CV
Cuernavaca MEXICO
hdelaconcha@agrinet.com.mx
Jason.Henning
i-Tree Team
Posts: 340
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2012 7:45 am

Re: Time line and other questions for tropical situations

Post by Jason.Henning » Tue Dec 06, 2016 2:04 pm

Testing your project while you still have crews in the field can be a great way identify any potential issues. You are correct that the pollution and stormwater related outputs may not be reflective of your final results but they should help you identify any major issues.

To review the data you can first use the "Check data" button on the "Data" tab. That should catch anything that will cause your data fail submission. After that it can be useful to quickly check all of the data by clicking on the column headings in the Tree and Plot data tables. That will sort each column and help you identify data that are missing or erroneously high or low. Often we see errors that are very high or low due to errors in data entry. Those are the basic steps I take when reviewing collected data.

As far as your palm tree question, the condition of those trees should not have a drastic impact on your results. This document, http://www.itreetools.org/resources/man ... ations.pdf explains how the different inputs impact the estimated outputs. The crown health measurement will impact carbon sequestration and storage, in that tree growth will be reduced based on tree health. Similarly, this impact on tree growth and the rates at which mortality occurs are included in the Forecast model. Crown health also reduces the individual trees structural value. Lastly crown health impacts wildlife suitability but the wildlife suitability results are not currently available for projects outside the US.
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