For nearly a century, Prentiss & Carlisle has managed commercial timberland in North America for clients with diverse objectives. Our integrated forestry and financial teams bring years of technical field experience, delivering accurate, in-depth reports to help landowners and investment professionals make informed decisions about their forests.
Timber Inventory
Having good data is the basis for confident decision making, and you have to trust the data as much as the decision. That’s why P&C’s forestry staff brings years of education and field experience to our consulting clients, delivering accurate, in-depth reports to help landowners make informed decisions. We have completed inventory projects on more that 500,000 acres in the past five years, installing more than 10,000 cruise plots for a variety of needs. Our flexible in-house inventory processing system allows us to calculate merchantable timber volume by product as well as standing and downed deadwood volume and tonnage. Whether it’s routine monitoring, undertaking due diligence for an acquisition, or assessing the forest’s growth or carbon potential, P&C has done it all.
Inventory Quality Control
A reliable timber inventory is the backbone for making confident decisions about your forest. P&C’s quality control services help landowners, land managers, and analysts evaluate timber inventories by providing an independent, third-party audit of timber inventory data. Our staff will visit existing timber inventory plot locations to determine if the data collected during the inventory is consistent with the cruise specifications. This helps mitigate any human error in the timber inventory data and promotes confidence in the overall timber inventory product.
Timber Supply Analysis and Growth & Yield Modeling
What are the short- and long-term growth projections for your forestland? What products can you expect it to generate now and in the future? How can you best balance goals and constraints? How can you maximize growth to get the most out of your investment?
At P&C, we use a variety of models to estimate growth and yield for investment-grade timber properties, so you can make confident decisions about your long-term timber supply. These can help provide strategic guidance for your management decisions, such as:
- Estimates of sustainable annual harvest levels
- Comparisons between different management regimes
- Analyses of the effect of regulations or voluntary conservation projects
- Cash flow estimates
Complex models can, and often do, provide complex results. Without an in-depth understanding of the biologic, economic, and political forces that impact your forest resource, it is nearly impossible to analyze this data correctly—or to use it advantageously. P&C can help you critically review growth data, inputs, and outcomes for reasonableness, and make sure that your cash flow will stand the test of time.
Geographic Information System (GIS) Analysis & Mapping
Modern GIS is more than just mapping—it’s a critical decision making tool. At P&C, we use GIS every day in order to make better decisions about forest management—from optimizing road configurations, harvest planning, and monitoring, to analyzing access and operability constraints and ensuring regulatory or certification compliance. With experienced staff and cutting edge technology, P&C is able to perform GIS analysis and mapping for any size project, whether it is maintaining data on an ongoing basis or providing a one-time analytic.
Remote Sensing & Image Interpretation
Remote sensing is the science of obtaining information about objects or areas from a distance, typically from aircraft or satellites. Image or photo interpretation is an art within this science where a knowledgeable interpreter, using stereo imagery and experience, can accurately identify forest cover types, wetlands, or land use patterns. P&C’s staff have many years of image interpretation experience, including automation and inclusion of the data into a GIS.
GIS Analysis & Compliance Monitoring
P&C can create spatially-accurate digital data from airborne or satellite imagery to be used in conjunction with GPS data to make custom maps or for detailed spatial analysis on forested properties. Through this process, we collect and integrate data on forest types, forest roads, and harvesting activities to assist foresters and landowners in making informed decisions on how best to monitor and manage forests. This ability is key to meeting the typical monitoring requirements necessary for third-party forest sustainability certification or working forest easement monitoring.