2026 Big Sky GeoCon - From Data to Design

Since the 1980s, the Montana DNRC’s Stand Level Inventory (SLI) has supported forest management on Trust Lands through walkthrough-based field assessments of stand conditions. While foundational, this method presented challenges in data consistency, repeatability, and maintenance. Leveraging recent statewide LiDAR acquisition, DNRC developed the Remote Forest Inventory (RFI), integrating timber cruise data with LiDAR to produce spatially continuous, landscape-scale forest metrics. This presentation highlights DNRC’s application of GIS and remote sensing in developing the RFI, a modernization effort that transformed legacy inventory methods into a precise, efficient, and scalable framework for forest data management.