Howdy SOFAC Members. We have some exciting news to share with you today! We can now produce INV files with basins defined via polygons rather than collections of counties.

To take advantage of this, send us a geoJSON or Shapefile that contains the basin name(s) and geometry.

Below is an example of this process. Let’s say we want to understand the inventory in and around a potential mill site in Roxboro, NC.

Here we drew a simple 100 mile radius around our proposed facility. To get an INV file for this region we construct a geoJSON from this that looks roughly like:

We use geopandas to construct this file, but ArcGIS or other GIS software would work. The important part is there’s a tag for basin name and then the associated geometry.

Once you have your area defined, the team here at NCSU will spatially join the polygons you’ve sent with plot locations in the FIA data and construct bespoke INV files from there.

Below is a brief overview of the basin we defined earlier:

There are a few drawbacks and limitations that come along with this method.

• We do not produce a county trends file, but instead produce a basin trends file. This can be tricky is a basin spans multiple states and they do not have homogeneous evaluation years.
• This process only works for single owner files. We are not able to produce differentiated private ownership files with this method.
• TPO Adjustment Factors are still available based on counties only. If you want to use these you will also need a county list approximation (early enhancement to automate the generation of this list coming).
• Longer turn-around times as we continue to automate and train the team on the new functionality.

This new functionality is still in its beta-testing stage so we will be working out any bugs and continuing to improve the functionality. If you’re interested or have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Richard Manner ([email protected]).