Mobile Applications for Planters?

[Planter18]

Has anyone heard of some kind of mobile app that planters/foreman/supervisors/checkers can use?
The majority of planters these days have their cell phones on the block and I have heard that a lot of companies have started to give their foremen and supervisors Ipads or other similar tablets for viewing maps.
Is there an application available to link this all together so that planters could keep track of tallies and forward them to foreman who could keep track of trees and block allocations and then push this along to a supervisor who would be able to keep track of tree ordering and salary payouts?

Cheers

[mcD]

there is an app and associated Database called PlanWizard. It does not involve planters though, only Supervisors/Clients/nurseries. I though about some kind of a tally sheet app that planters could sync, but there are a lot of problems as it is with Data entry and getting tallies on time is a huge problem already for most managers.

[retrovertigo]

yeah, there's Plant Wizard - http://www.jrpltd.com/Login.aspx - "an internet based seed & seedling inventory system used by nurseries, foresters, and planting contractors to manage seedling inventory information in real time."

then there's Avenza for pdf maps - http://www.avenza.com/

Both are available for Apple or Android. I don't think the average planter would have much use for Plant Wizard though. A tally app could be cool for motel shows I guess if the supervisor wants to set some kind of deadline, like submitting your numbers within an hour of getting back. Wouldn't be much use for bush camps without reception.

A quick look on google shows there's a number of generic tallying apps that could be used for this. But like McD says it'd be pretty useless to a foreman/supervisor unless it could integrate directly into Plant Wizard, as they would still have to manually transfer all the numbers to their spreadsheets.

BTW, since I was thinking of asking this in the pdf maps thread - are overview maps available to the public in any way? Or if anyone has some for the Island/Coast and is willing to pass them on? I was using Avenza for the first time this year on my phone, between my own contracts and a couple of friends foremanning for other companies, I collected a bunch mapping out most of the Okanagan/W. Kootenays. I've checked out the TRIM maps from the BC government but the overviews tend to have better detail of logging roads. Could be a useful resource for backroad exploration and camping.

[Planter18]

Ya I remember plant-wizard.
I think that all block and overview maps are created and maintained by the foresters themselves.

I was looking for something like Avenza's ability to show a map and then have further functionality to pinpoint locations on it where you have done plots, keep an ongoing tally of all plots and come up with some quality numbers for a block, also have some measurement tools to calculate sizes of prospective pieces and their allocations for planters.

I think something like that could be very helpful. But you are right, it may be more at a foreman->supervisor level than planters.

[Nate]

It's quite easy to take Arc GIS shapefiles and convert them to Google KML/KMZ files.

A planter can pull out his smart phone and see the block in google maps.

If I ever run a crew again I'd like to try this out with a few of the planters. Let them cut their pieces based upon where their GPS shows them on google maps. You'd be able to calculate the number of boxes they need for each species for their piece, which would be very helpful. The accuracy on smartphone GPS' are decent enough that you wouldn't be out that much and if the full block boundaries are properly flagged then it all averages out anyway. A block here or there might be off. You can also put information on the block or the specific piece into the polygon that the planter would be planting in as their "piece". For example, you can put what their species ratios are or what the spacing is or how you'll rip their arms off and beat them with their own appendages if they plant 16s in the creamy sand pile in the back of their piece.

It would also be a good safety feature in terms of location awareness/orientation - which most planters are terrible with - you'd have all your roads mapped in and out and available to anyone with a smartphone so planters could easily check where they are in relation to other blocks and how to get places. Once you know how to interface between Arc/Google/Handheld data collection you can do some pretty powerful mapping that would traditionally take expensive survey crews with a decent degree of accuracy.

I tried doing this for a contractor once but they didn't have any real interest in it, partly because I didn't explain it very well I think and partly because I was just figuring it out myself at the time. I've been on the "forester" end of planting now a couple of times, and it's remarkable how much information can be passed along to planters digitally but isn't for whatever reason (planting companies don't ask for it, the forester isn't good with their software, the forester is lazy, whatever). Also, those giant maps that are like gold to supervisors and foremen really aren't that hard to create/print, and those make a world of difference.

[Scooter]

The majority of planters these days have their cell phones on the block

Somewhat true. I saw a growth in the number of cell phones on my own blocks for a couple years, but this past year, I think I actually saw a decrease again. That might only be because there was more of a mindset of either: (a) having a cell phone on a block might tempt you to be on the phone during the day, which cuts into your own earnings; or (b) some planters have realized that pretty much everything that gets taken out to a block can get broken/dirty/damaged/destroyed eventually. Of course that's one person's very random unofficial observation.

I have heard that a lot of companies have started to give their foremen and supervisors Ipads or other similar tablets for viewing maps.

In my own camp, we have an iPad that the checker uses. All of my foremen and myself have smart phones with Avenza installed, and Dropbox set up with all area and block maps for each contract. Four of my five foremen were quite adept at using Avenza and comfortable with it. One foremen preferred to remain in the dark ages and use paper maps. All five used a combination of both electronic and paper, so I'd never say that either should be used exclusively. I personally was a lot more comfortable with having the maps on my phone than having four binders full of paper maps in the truck. I had an inverter mounted on the dash of my truck this year so I could easily keep my phone fully charged at all times, and also used it for charging handheld radios. I've frequently wondered if it would be useful to have a Nexus 7 or some other tablet mounted in a windshield mount for navigation, but I find that since I'm always on logging roads when I'm trying to navigate, I'm comfortable with stopping the truck, picking up the phone and looking at the next couple minutes of directions, putting the phone down, and driving some more.


I wish there was an app that would emulate the BCTS FS 704 form, for checkers to punch in data in the field on a phone or tablet, and then it could just send the data through email in a spreadsheet format to any email address(es) that you specified. I've been thinking about learning the appropriate coding languages for Android and doing it myself, but I have a lot of other projects that I'd want to do before that.

If planters were asked to send tallies within an hour of getting back to the motel or camp, the person responsible for collecting them would waste far too much time chasing down people who are late. Almost the only way that I've seen it done effectively at any company is to get the numbers before the planters get out of the truck for dinner. Maybe the only exception was in a situation on a barge where tallies were collected in the kitchen as people came through to eat.

push this along to a supervisor who would be able to keep track of tree ordering

A lot of time, tree orders are done very far in advance, and the only changes are nudges by a day or two if the crew is running ahead/behind. The benefits of electronic data gathering would be fairly minimal on this particular process.

[RPF]

I wish there was an app that would emulate the BCTS FS 704 form, for checkers to punch in data in the field on a phone or tablet, and then it could just send the data through email in a spreadsheet format to any email address(es) that you specified.

There is something develop by JRP Solutions called SNAP that may be what you're looking for:
http://www.snapdcs.com/what-it-does-pap ... forms.html

[mcD]

SNAP could do the trick, but the cost is VERY prohibitive.

[sghyselincks]

Avenza is pure gold for planning your day of foremanning. You can use it to cut day-piece sizes to suit the different production averages of planters on the crew. You then have a rough idea of how man trees need to be delivered to caches (in actual practice the amount will vary a bit due to residuals and slashpiles). You won't end up overdelivering a piece and then having to move boxes this way.

[Scooter]

Another good app is GeoCam Pro by Wazar. Don't get the app of the same name that is produced by Sitis (or maybe it's better, I'm just not familiar with it). The Wazar app costs about $2.99.

The beauty of it is that it overlays GPS and GIS data on top of a photo that you take. I'll put some examples below. But of course, even if you don't want to overlay the data on a photo, if you bring it up on your GPS-enabled smartphone, then you can see things instantly like your lats and longs, elevation, compass reading, azimuth readings, etc. In other words, instead of spending $400 on a nice Garmin GPS, you can spend $3 and get some of the same functions that you're looking for. Realistically, handheld personal GPS devices will probably go the way of the buggy whip within a few years.

Anyway, there are some screen shots below, taken using GeoCam Pro on my Nexus 5 phone (Android OS). But since the original photos were super-sized, I had to reduce them from 3264x2448 pixels to a more Replant-friendly 900x600. So if you'd like to see one of the photos in its original resolution, click on the four links right here:

http://www.replant.ca/graphics/geocam01.jpg
http://www.replant.ca/graphics/geocam02.jpg
http://www.replant.ca/graphics/geocam03.jpg
http://www.replant.ca/graphics/geocam04.jpg

[mwainwright]

those examples would not have been as effective had one of them not been a picture of simon.

[Nate]

Looks like a treeplanting first person video game, which is long overdue.

[PlantinTaders]

In a tree planting video game you would be dead before you ever got Simon in your sights

[kootenaywrx]

Wonder what Simon is thinking?

[mcD]

how big will my next joint be? and who is watching me right now?

[mcD]

a very similar app would be Theodolite for ios. I have been using it to take tree heights in surveying. very accurate and at around $2 its $198 cheaper than a clino.

[Scooter]

Theodolite is good. I used it to figure out slopes on a bunch of blocks last fall where the data wasn't on the block maps.

[kootenaywrx]

a very similar app would be Theodolite for ios. I have been using it to take tree heights in surveying. very accurate and at around $2 its $198 cheaper than a clino.

Nice, very useful. Sometimes the clino is fogged or snowy. Would not just carry a tablet for this but add ovitalmap app. That would cut some time and save you going places one does not need to. Ovitalmap is google earth and other photos with gis. Plus other features.

[Scooter]

A lot of people use Plant Wizard. I really dislike their policy of only developing for mobile devices used by Apple, and due to this, have avoided using it or endorsing it whenever possible.

It costs almost half the price to buy an Android tablet that it does to buy an iPad. Granted, global market penetration on Android as an operating system for tablets is only 27% as of 2018. However, that number is rising. When you look at phones, Android has 88% overall market share globally. It just doesn't make sense for the makers of Plant Wizard to be ignoring this very significant portion of the market. If they want to encourage further adoption of their software within the industry, they need to be able to cater to a VERY large number of field staff who would prefer to use their own phones to enter plots, but who own Androids. I seem to have a conversation about this topic with someone different every two weeks. It may be that foresters who are getting their tablets paid for by their companies or by the government are complacent about this issue, but planters often prefer to use their own devices in the field. In some cases, this is because planters prefer to be able to concurrently deal with emails and texts without having to carry a second device. In other cases, it's because their employers aren't able to afford to buy an iPad for every member of middle management.

If you'd like to contact their support department to suggest that they start to remedy this situation, here's the email: support@jrpltd.com