Volume reports are back and better than ever!

We are excited to tell you that we have just finished switching Plot Hound volume reports over to a more localized and more accurate volume calculation method. If you’ve submitted a volume report in the past few weeks, you may have noticed that it took a long time to get the report back.  We’d like to thank you for your patience. Reports are not only back on track now, but better than before! The long explanation for what we did, and why it matters for you and your work, will be discussed in blog posts for the rest of this year. If you have any questions about your new (or old) reports, send us an email or leave a comment below!

Advanced Search and Filtering

Hot on the heels of our last update (Improved Cruise Page), we're rolling out another big improvement to the Plot Hound web interface: advanced searching and filtering.  Now it is easier than ever to find the cruises and stands you're looking for.

When you click the "Cruises / Stands" link at the top of your Dashboard page, you'll see a list of your stands.  Click the green "Add Filter" button to start narrowing things down.  You can filter by cruiser, cruise status, start date, finish date, county, tag, and stand name.

As our own collection of stands and cruises has grown into the thousands, we found ourselves needing a way to handle the explosion of data.  Tags and this new filtering feature have made our lives much happier!

Improved Cruise Page

We're rolling out lots of improvements to the Plot Hound website over the next few weeks.  Last week we launched a brand new cruise dashboard so you can keep tabs on your pending cruises.  This week, we're excited to go live with a cruise page.  We've totally redesigned the cruise page to be information rich, yet well-organized and easily digestible.

One of the first things you'll notice is that we've made the stand map much smaller to make room for the cruise info bar and the plot tally that now makes up the bottom half of the page.  You can still explore your stand by clicking the "expand" link to get a full-screen map view.

We've made the links to download your cruise KML, GPX, or shapefile more prominent and added the option to drop all incomplete plots - useful for when you decide to only measure a subset of your original plots.

The biggest change is the plot tally now displayed at the bottom of the page.  You can view the status of individual plots and even click the "details" link to see the trees that were measured:

When your cruise is complete, all of your graphs and reports are prominently displayed and available for download.  Clicking on a graph expands it and opens up a carousel that you can click through to see all of your graphs up close.

The new cruise page has changed the way we manage our own cruises and hope you find it useful as well!

Launching Plot Hound Dashboard

Today we're excited to announce the latest improvement to the Plot Hound experience - a new web dashboard for tracking cruise progress across your entire team:

We built the dashboard because we do a lot of cruises but didn't have a quick and easy way to answer the questions:

• Which cruises got finished this week?
• Which cruises are almost done?
• Which cruises aren't started yet?
• When will a particular cruise be done?

With the new Plot Hound dashboard, we can answer all of these questions at a glance.  High-level stats about your cruise productivity are displayed prominently.  Each of your recently completed and in-progress cruises is displayed in an data-rich card with information about the start date, cruiser, acreage, number of plots, progress, and an estimate of the completion time.

The dashboard has already improved our workflow here at SilviaTerra and we hope it's helpful for you as well!

New Plot Hound video tutorial

Today we're excited to publish our updated Plot Hound tutorial video.  Check it out below to start cruising in less than 5 minutes!

As always, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any questions about Plot Hound.

SilviaTerra in the Scientific American

SilviaTerra was just featured in an article about next-generation forestry in the Scientific American.  We're dedicated to pushing the state-of-the-art forward and are excited to contribute to the future of data-driven forestry.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/foresters-now-monitoring-tree-populations-from-space-slide-show/

Zack and his trusty Plott Hound Zoey at plot center

Offline Mapping in Plot Hound

Today we're excited to announce another much-requested feature: Offline Mapping.

It's no fun to be out cruising without a map.  Now Plot Hound makes it easy for you to cache aerial imagery of your stand so that you can always see a map - even when you don't have a data connection.

Here's how it works:

Click the download button in the top right of the Cruise page

You'll see the button start spinning, and then you'll get a message that your download is complete

Aerial imagery will be downloaded to your phone and will be displayed on the Map page

Plot Hound caches multiple zoom levels, so you can zoom all the way in to your stand, or all the way out to the surrounding area.

Right now, the offline mapping feature is limited to stands that are 60 acres or smaller.  It's also somewhat experimental, so please let us know if it gives you any trouble!  We're also working on adding topographic data to the aerial imagery as well.

As always, we're looking forward to your feedback - please leave a comment below!