Assessing spatial harvest schedules - Feature highlight: Locate inoperable, prescheduled activities

Forest analysts/planners are faced with the task of validating or otherwise using model-generated activity schedules to produce management plans that reflect operational realities. Ultimately, the objective is to set out a pre-determined schedule of activities that will be followed in the near term for input into the long-term planning model. It is common for planner-modified or prescheduled activities to represent what the model deems to be invalid or inoperable options—either the forest type is not eligible for the assigned activity at all, or activities are scheduled outside of defined eligibility windows. The purpose of this tech tip is to describe how to identify inoperable, prescheduled activities stored in a shapefile.

Prescheduled activities may include ineligible forest classes for any number of reasons: errors in data, re-configured harvest units, narrow operability windows to name a few. To assess the cause of inoperability and clean the activity schedule prior to loading it into the planning model, you must be able to identify the inoperable activities.

You can use Spatial Woodstock to check for a range of shapefile attribute errors including inoperable prescheduled activities. You can store the results of the error check directly in the shapefile so that you can easily identify and inspect any reported errors.

You access the shapefile attribute error reporting tool from the Maps view.
To check for inoperable activities do the following:

1. Right-click in the Maps view to display the map context menu.

2. Mouse-over Reports & Summaries and select Report shapefile problems from the submenu. This displays the Report Shapefile Problems dialog.

3. Under Check Shapefile for, click the Inoperable blocked polygons checkbox. Ensure that all other checkboxes remain unchecked.

4. Under Results, click Store results in shapefile field.

5. Click the Store results in downarrow and select a field to store the error check codes.

6. Optionally, click the Draw on map checkbox. This prompts Spatial Woodstock to update the map display with the results of the error check.

7. Click the Calculate button on the bottom of the dialog to generate the error report.


Inoperable activities are assigned a value of 6 in the shapefile attribute table. Spatial Woodstock also generates an error summary in an untitled ASCII file that opens automatically after the check is complete.