Overview
The Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) required a new approach for the inventory and management of public lands. The overall project was to develop a web application that allowed MDC Central Office, field staff and external contractors to facilitate timber data collection, inventory and timber sales in an integrated mobile component to support in-the-field forest inventory activities.
This project began with a discovery phase effort that documented the existing processes, entities and current application. In the same discovery effort, the future processes, entities and user stories were documented. Based on the new requirements, Timmons Group researched commercial off-the-shelf applications on the market to determine if a commercial solution could meet MDC’s needs. Based on the findings, there was no solution capable of meeting all the business requirements and desired architecture required for the Forest Inventory and Timber Sale application. Based on these facts, MDC made the decision to have a customized application developed. Timmons Group designed, developed, and trained MDC staff on how to best utilize MoFITS to its full potential.
The web application is integrated with the MDC’s Enterprise GIS. The mobile application does not interface with the Enterprise GIS but does capture the GPS coordinates of latitude/longitude for each plot. The project was completed using agile and iterative software development approaches.
