REVIEW OF OPEN SOURCE QGIS FORESTRY PLUGINS

Abstract

To date, the forestry industry has obtained certain experience in implementing Open Source software. The article describes Open Source QGIS-plugins for the tasks of forest fires and forest resources monitoring and management in research and applications. The functionality analysis performed aimed to simplify the selection of tools for a forest geoinformation project in desktop and web versions. The article presents a brief description of presently downloadable QGIS (version 3.18.1) forestry plugins. The analysis of external QGIS-plugins for working with forest resources and fires has shown the heterogeneity of research. This prevents from identifying trends so far. An option for future research subjects may be development of plugins with available data as cartographic services for territories of different spatial coverage, taking into account that archived data and their availability is a key asset in the forestry. Subject-related forest scope in the present-day repository of QGIS-plugins tends to be relatively limited. Transport and environmental applications implemented in the form of GIS tools are more numerous and can solve individual tasks in the orest project. A review of plugins functionality, compatibility to the core QGIS and their performance should be performed on a regular basis, following new QGIS versions.