http://fwie.fw.vt.edu/rhgiles/
A Web site since December, 1998

An Introduction to the Web Site and
Units of Lasting Forests

Learning together, working together...

You may click on one of the major units of this Web site listed above or as they are presented in the Contents.

A detailed list of the contents is also available.

I retired from Virginia Tech in June, 1998, and am now working with this private Web site to try to provide you with some information, ideas, knowledge, software, and links about wildlands and related natural resources. Perhaps it will help you to understand them as I do, their limits and potentials, and to predict changes that are likely due to management...or the lack of it.

My strong bias is for modified general systems theory. Maybe we can share ideas and knowledge, test the goodness of some of them on the land, and gain energy for the fight ahead for an environment fit for humans.

Collectively, I call the Web units and areas in which I am now working Lasting Forests , a system that I am attempting to design and one day help bring into operation. I hope that you will be interested in many of the units or their parts and will share them with your colleagues and others. I encourage use of this site and all of its parts, down-loading, etc. I'll appreciate credit, but the real intent of this work is to get these ideas and concepts into practice where they can do people some good out on the land.

This Web site is much like a set of books. You may click to a book, then to its chapters, then back and forth among topics. It is called by some a "hypertext." There are also extra booklets and appendices to which you may also click. VisualBasic programs are under development. I am transforming about 300 of my BASIC MS-DOS programs into forms that may be useful to the field person and resource manager (and to students on the paths to becoming such people). Programs (and other material) will be posted as they become available and they will be indicated in the text where they are most applicable. Users are encouraged to study the "books" and to follow the hyperlinks among them. The world of nature and natural resources is strongly linked; some of these linkages (the so-called relations of ecology) are shown and developed within this Web site.

1. Lasting Forests -- A set of about 20 wildland enterprises that may one day become operational. This is largely a design document but each of the enterprises has been described and their relationships shown. Some of the enterprises are being created as if there were an actual customer. All are based on past work, programs, and geographic information systems and optimization work. It is partially an advisory and consulting activity but the emphasis is on active land management for the small private landowner -- in a share cropper, land-renter, cooperative mode -- probably in a new type of limited partnership, all with the diversity and stability of a planned profit-achieving system. This system strongly reflects the profit and not-for-profit concepts that I began advancing in the late 1990's.

2. Ranging and the Nature of Business -- Advancing a new inclusive concept for ecotourism, sight-seeing, and dispersed outdoor recreation called ranging. This unit includes a book that concentrates on energy budgets and draws analogies between ecosystem theory and general business principles. It relates the product life cycle to ecological succession and wrestles with concepts of synergism and stability. Joe Sirgy, Dept. of Marketing, Va. Tech, was an early advisor and collaborator. Rangin' 'Round the Region is included. It is a proposed regional approach to ranging.

3. Guidance (Equivalent to The Trevey within Lasting Forests) -- There are 40 definitions of planning and few people agree on any of them. A system has been needed to guide decisions about the future of large tracts of land such as counties, forests, and wildlife refuges. A version of Guidance has been created for the Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head, Maryland, and it is now being revised and developed further for other military bases and large land holdings. The concept is one of a living, dynamic plan. Plans are those "dusty books on the shelf; outdated before they arrived from the printer." Guidance is a planning system on the web. With a password, an owner/manager can gain access. A universal pattern of the plan exists; data unique to each area are collected in the field; entered into programs; and the results from computer analyses are used to "fill in the blanks", creating a very large, unique, area-specific and owner-objective-specific document for an area under contract. The system can produce a total document, but it typically produces "chapters", tables, color maps of work areas, and summary pages for optimization runs made after land or data change (e,g., a fire last night; a dam break; an acquisition; a change in objectives). Guidance is a major component of Lasting Forests.

4. Wildland Intelligence -- A subsystem of Lasting Forests and The Trevey, Wildland Intelligence provides diagnoses and descriptions of a tract of land. It is a rapid, cost-effective, computer-aided rapid analysis of a large piece of land with trees. It leads to unifying multiple ownerships into a sustained, cost-effective improved land management over many years, typically 100 years (with the horizon sliding forward a year every year). It is a tree-land based analysis, providing from data banks and highly select field observations military-like intelligence about a tract. Results are also useful to realtors. Designed for Virginia and Maryland, it is very likely to be useful throughout the region.

5. The Fishery -- The Fishery is the total system having a central theme of fish, fishing, and their management. The Fishery has two divisions, ponds and streams, and these are connected and related with multiple objectives, only a few of which are associated with big fish and catching them.

6. Pest Force -- Design of a profitable system for vertebrate animal damage management with supportive text, leads, links, and ideas on controlling damage (including controlling animals). It presents such management as a major component of faunal system management and Gamma Theory.

7. Gamma Theory -- An attempt to describe what a systems approach to faunal system management might mean and become. This web site includes notes for a class in modern wildlife resource management and educational units of a wide variety, including lectures, revised papers, educational notes and units, photographs, GIS images, and over 100 computer programs, most in MS DOS GWBASIC. Check out the Star Lights by clicking on the stars found scattered throughout the text.

8. Wildlife Law Enforcement Systems -- A large manuscript and relevant computer programs, a subunit of Gamma Theory that contends that all work with faunal systems must be judged over time and that success is conditional upon cost-effective enforcement systems. The site displays many years of studies of the author with graduate students of wildlife law enforcement, a field needing further studies.

9. Antler Points --Articles and notes on white-tailed deer management, but really about Lasting Forests Deer Group and about comprehensive resource management in a new era of major agency cutbacks, reorganization, uncertainty, and staff fear. Partially a step toward privatization, which seems to be something a majority of people want today (but few can describe), Antler Points is also creative. It suggests the potentials in resource management for the agency as well as the entrepreneur and thoughtful outdoor person. "Everything is connected" is the mantra of ecologists and Antler Points confirms this. This is a web unit about the deer and many things from the perspective of the deer and people interested in it. Authors work on the idea of relations and share the pleasures of seeing and understanding these relations. It is a test of an idea that the world can be seen from the vantage-point of the deer. It promotes a comprehensive benefit-production system for public as well as private land management, often with a profit motive, always with high accountability and cost effectiveness.

10. Species-Specific Management (SSM) -- Over 60 files describing procedures and actions to manage species (or groups such as songbirds and predators). I organized, designed the work, and shared my files with students. These students over many years did library work, and I edited and added to their work. The results are excellent "here is what to do" statements without much fluff or theory. I'll welcome similar contributions from students, faculty, etc. It is such a waste to have students do work that contributes only to their personal well-being! SSM was and remains a strategy to build a part of a knowledge base and to apply feedback to it.

11. Forest Faunal Systems -- A 1600 page book manuscript about a systems approach to the modern management of the forest wildlife (all of the fauna; little about plants).

12. The Realtor -- A system being slowly created to deliver to realtors descriptions of properties. Documents within this system (web site sources) are hypothesized to augment sales and enhance the benefits and appreciation and long-term care of land by the owner who knows a great deal (more than the conventional land owner) about their land and its limits and potentials (e.g., in ranging).

13. Ideas for Development -- I have maintained a 4 x 6 inch card file over the years into which I have placed ideas. (Ideas are easily lost; getting them back is like trying to remember dreams.) Actively writing them helps them materialize for future thought. Old guys do not have enough time, energy, or talent to finish with their ideas. As usual, some cannot take the risk to try. Some people claim that an idea is no good unless and until it is implemented. Perhaps these ideas will be interesting, may stimulate others, and may clarify work or creativity.

14. The Wilderness -- Wilderness ecology, thoughts on wilderness research, ancient forests, and old-growth. Preliminary descriptions of the Rich Hole Wilderness Area (George Washington NF, Allegheny Co., Virginia, USA).

15. Dickenson Departure -- A web book about the relevance of Lasting Forests and its concepts to a county in the Virginia coalfield (and similar areas).

16. News -- Major changes in the site.

17. Appendices -- Glossary; Measures and Coefficients; Contacts and Favorite Links; my Curriculum Vitae with publication list.

I hope you will be a frequent user of these resources and that we may correspond for their improvements. Send me e-mail or other mail to 504 Rose Avenue, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA 24060. My phone is 540-552-8672.