Context
A family woodland owner who wants a stewardship plan starts from a problem that has nothing to do with forestry: they need accurate maps of their own property, and getting them has historically meant hiring someone. LandMapper exists so that the first step costs nothing.
Decision
The unglamorous choice was to make the output portable rather than to make the application impressive. A woodland owner does not want a dashboard. They want a PDF they can put on a truck seat, a shapefile their consulting forester can open, and a map whose legend means the same thing in Oregon as it does in Washington. Everything I built followed from that.
Contribution
I am a named co-author and one of its longest-running engineers. My work includes georeferenced PDF generation, GIS downloads, state-specific map legends, conservation maps, migrating the document editor, and hardening and testing the shapefile export.
Result
LandMapper is free, open source, and in use across Oregon and Washington. The Western SARE project behind it received $349,981, and the tool is referenced in woodland-owner education material published by Know Your Forest. Usage totals — how many properties and acres have been mapped — sit in the evidence ledger awaiting an analytics export, and are deliberately absent here until then.
Learning
This is the project that taught me what maintenance actually is. Across the years, the document editor was replaced, the export path was rewritten for security, and the mapping conventions were reworked twice — and to the woodland owner, nothing happened. Keeping a public tool unchanged on the outside while everything underneath it moves is a distinct engineering skill, and it is most of what I do now.