NATRS 292 - Resource Sampling and Appraisal of Forest Condit

Credits: 8
Students acquire skills and knowledge to measure, calculate, and sample resources and forest products to determine value using statistically valid procedures. A rigorous course using skills and knowledge of tree diseases and disasters affecting forest product quality. Includes classroom, field studies and library research.

Enrollment Requirement: NATRS 182  with a grade of 2.0 or higher; and instructor consent.

Course Outcomes:
Students who successfully complete this class will be able to:

1. Demonstrate their knowledge diseases which impact tree and log volumes and the reasons to assess dead and living trees in a forest.
2. Demonstrate their ability to identify the various types of inventory processes and appraisals required by employers.
3. Demonstrate the ability to complete thorough, orderly, concise note-keeping and mapping procedures.
4. Demonstrate how to accurately use equipment and methods common in the natural resources fields in performance of timber appraisal and to use statistical methods to assess and validate the results of sampling processes.
5. Demonstrate how to refine previously learned skills to measure or calculate diameters, distances, heights, basal area, and volume of logs, trees in stands of trees. 
6. Demonstrate their knowledge of tree and shrub species, forest diseases, forest types, log grades, and log sorts, use of aerial photography and maps, and different cruising methods. 
7. Demonstrate the ability to identify harvesting equipment, how to use desktop computer applications to calculate stumpage values. SuperAce
8. Demonstrate their ability to plan, design, and layout, a timber harvest.

Manage Forestland and Resources to attain positive outcomes.

Demonstrate effective written and verbal communications between industry partners and cooperators.

College-wide Outcomes

• Critical Thinking - Critical thinking finds expression in all disciplines and everyday life. It is characterized by an ability to reflect upon thinking patterns, including the role of emotions on thoughts, and to rigorously assess the quality of thought through its work products. Critical thinkers routinely evaluate thinking processes and alter them, as necessary, to facilitate an improvement in their thinking and potentially foster certain dispositions or intellectual traits over time.
• Responsibility - Responsibility encompasses those behaviors and dispositions necessary for students to be effective members of a community. This outcome is designed to help students recognize the value of a commitment to those responsibilities which will enable them to work successfully individually and with others.
• Quantitative and Symbolic Reasoning - Quantitative Reasoning encompasses abilities necessary for a student to become literate in today’s technological world. Quantitative reasoning begins with basic skills and extends to problem solving.
• Written Communication - Written Communication encompasses all the abilities necessary for effective expression of thoughts, feelings, and ideas in written form.