Snow, Bitterlich, and Tea on the
Tailgate - Inventory Work in Siberia
Forest Inventory Systems Manager
Mason, Bruce, & Girard, Inc.
In February of this year I found myself in Tomsk,
a city of 600,000 people in western Siberia. I was there as a consulting
forester on behalf of a consortium of investors considering a forest
products manufacturing venture there, and my job was to verify the
inventory.
 The forest inventory was developed and maintained
by the Ministry of Natural Resources, which in Russia is a branch of the
military. So on this particular morning I was standing across the table from
a General in the Russian army, dressed in his uniform with medals and
ribbons, looking both perturbed and apprehensive about the prospects of this
American stranger taking a look at his inventory and passing judgment on the
accuracy of his records. He was flanked by several businessmen with a large
interest in the outcome of our deliberations. We were joined by our
interpreter, Natasha, a Russian who had spent some time studying in Japan
and London, with a pretty good command of English.
After shaking hands and exchanging greetings we
sat down around the conference table and started talking about what we
intended to do over the next few days. "We" included myself and
Ken Vroman from MB&G, and our cruisers, who would be coming in a couple
of weeks. The basic idea was to gain an understanding of how the inventory
was arranged, how the data had been collected, and how it was maintained,
and then design a sampling scheme to verify that what was in the books was
actually on the ground. Our understanding was that the inventory was stand
based, and basically consisted of cubic meters by species, with no
breakdowns by product or grade; so another goal was to develop a way to take
their inventory volumes and redefine them in more detail.
As the biometrician on this project I had great
plans to select a sample of stands using PPS sampling from a sorted list,
cruise those stands, and use ratio estimation to develop an opinion about
the accuracy of the inventory. I had used this approach in past projects,
and it worked well.
The rub is that this requires a list of stands
with their areas and/or volumes. After talking with the General for a while,
it became clear that we were going to have to come up with a Plan B. When I
explained what I intended to do, he started laughing (politely), and
explained through the interpreter that (1) there were about one million
stands in the area of interest, and (2) there was no list, and no computer
files from which a list could be established. In fact, none of the inventory
data was in any kind of computerized system.
What we did have to work with was a room of about
600 books with inventory data broken out by ownership, compartment, and
stand. For each stand there were two or three typewritten lines of data,
including total cubic meters by species, hectares, whether or not this was
productive forest, and notes about the stand made by the cruiser - "wet
ground", "good for berries", etc. We had 600 books describing
the inventory on 45 million acres in about 1 million stands, spread over an
area about the size of Oregon and Washington. In cubic meters. In Russian.
The General knew we had a problem. So did I, but
I told myself this wasn't a problem, this was an opportunity. Still, it was
going to be a late night coming up with Plan B.
The General was curious about how our cruisers
would do their work. He was a forester by training, and was very familiar
with basic cruising and inventory work. I explained that we planned to use
prism plots. He didn't understand. I tried the term "variable
radius". Nope. I drew pictures, but they didn't help. Finally I said
"Bitterlich", which he understood.
He dismissed that idea, explaining to me that our
folks would be on a single plot all day long, because so many trees would be
tally trees. I explained that our cruisers would be picking a basal area
factor that would give us an average of 5 to 8 tally trees per plot. This
idea seemed totally foreign to him, and it turned out that he had been
working under a policy that dictated a single BAF, and evidently a
relatively low one, no matter what the stand looked like. So his cruisers
had been on single plots all day long, and therefore Bitterlich sampling was
not generally used.
The next surprise had to do with measuring DBH. I
mentioned that our cruisers would be putting a tape around the tree to
measure DBH, and he took the opportunity to correct me, explaining to the
folks around the table that I meant circumference, not diameter. No, I
explained, I mean diameter. It turned out that he had not heard of or seen a
d-tape before, and all their diameter work had been done with calipers.
I couldn't wait to show him data recorders and
lasers.
Over the next several days Ken and I and Natasha
huddled over the 600 inventory books and slowly put a cruise plan together.
We got to know the General a little better each day, and by the end of our
visit we had developed some mutual respect and trust. We spent a great day
in the woods on an active logging job, brushing snow off the stumps and
counting rings. We even had tea on the tailgate of his jeep, and swapped
lies about adventures in the woods. We made jokes, we laughed, and we
learned a lot about each other. Our cruisers had the same experience a few
weeks later when they were paired up with Russian cruisers and spent some
long days in the woods.
In the end we did come up with a plan to verify
the inventory (but that is the subject of another article). All in all, this
was a great experience, and it drove home the point that it's not the
technology - it's the people.
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