REVIEW OF OPEN SOURCE QGIS FORESTRY PLUGINS

Abstract

Forest industry today has some experience of using Open Source-programs. The article describes the Open Source QGIS plugins to solve the forestry challenges for the forest fire management and forest resources in scientific and applied research. Undertaken analysis will simplify selection of tools for a forest geoinformation project in Desktop and Web versions. A general brief description of modern plugins in QGIS (version 3.18.1) is given, and forestry plugins are characterized. An analysis of external QGIS plugins for working with forest resources and forest fires showed the heterogeneity of research, which has not identified any trends yet. Development of plugins with available data as map services for territories of different spatial coverage may be an option for the future research, while the ability to access archived data is important for the forest industry. The niche of thematic forest tasks in the modern QGIS plugin repository continues to be quite narrow. Transport and environmental applications implemented in GIS tools are more numerous and can solve some tasks of a forest project. Such review of plugins’ functionality should be done on a regular basis, following new developments and new versions of QGIS software.