I have a tool to share. It is used in a similar way as the classic forestry tools known as the Biltmore stick and the cruising prism. But it is used for different purposes. My adaptations are designed with other agroforesters in mind, as well as consulting forestry clients managing their private non-industrial forest.
These tools are for people who do forest stand improvement, & for whatever reason want to measure “waste wood” from these treatments. For agroforesters pursuing forest farming, this tool is handy. You might find yourself thinning overstocked oak woodlands in order to better cultivate sun-adapted NTFP herbs, such as black cohosh. Cutting trees out without selling to a logger means cutting small diameter trees to make growing space for healthy larger trees. These cull trees may be suppressed, they may be of a species that isn’t part of the plan, or maybe there are just too many trees and competition between them has grown fierce. Either way, logs from this light-on-the-land management have many uses. Timber-framing elements are useful in green building, with the smaller logs useful for mushroom bolts, and the even smaller poles useful for various crafts and as fuelwood.
This was manufactured by me and friends working together at the Athens Makerspace, with design sessions happening in our homes. Special thanks to Asa Peller (A-STUDIO) and Henry Hellbusch, as well as Pauline Phillips (our Makerspace guardian angel). It is because of these specialized uses for small roundwood that we started this project, because now the board foot scale on both sides of the measuring stick goes down to half a 16′ sawlog, and uses the International 1/4 Rule- rather than Doyle Rule. Thus we avoid underestimating timber volume from the narrower & shorter logs, which is a classic problem with tree measuring sticks. Because we didn’t need our stick to be 36″ long to measure the diameter of small roundwood, we made it 25″ long. This allows us to attach a 3-D printed angle gauge (a type of crusing prism), for variable radius plot cruising.
The 25″ length of the stick is the same distance that the angle gauge must be held from one’s eye. Thus you can hold the stick up to your face and look through the angle gauge, at the precisely correct distance from your face for conducting forest inventory.
I hope users will find adapting and combining these inventory tools to be very useful. If you would like to purchase one of these, please reach out to me through this website.
Badger Johnson for Paradise Ecological Services LLC
Paradise Ecological Services 