Development of a Government GIS for Forest Management at Hsinchu County in Taiwan

Hsinchu Science Park, one of the most productive electronic sites in the world, is located at Hsinchu County. Hsinchu County Government is entitled for daily management to pursue the objectives of making every county citizen prosperous. Several web-based management information systems have been developed for county management and were widely implemented. However, forest management is one of several tasks which need development of web-based geographic information systems. The objectives of this paper are to develop GIS for forest management at Hsinchu County in order to solve problems encountered in the rapid changing circumstance. The objectives of forest management at Hsinchu County have been changed a little bit in the last decade. Now, it mainly focuses on public and private forest, tree planting, wind break forest management, and plane forest planting. The major ingredients of GIS for forest management are user-friendly, task-oriented, and direct linking to the existing GIS at Hsinchu County. AreIMS and ArcGIS were used for web-based GIS. Field operations of forest management depend on PDA and GPS such that ArcPAD is implemented both on personal computers and PDA. Computer programming is required for database management and development of application modules in forest management. Color digital orthophoto maps at scale of 1:5000 provide very useful background information. Forest management at Hsinchu County now is operated in an efficient way that GIS, remote sensing, GPS and PDA are working smoothly.