RESEARCH SCREENING
Know what the evidence
can tell you.
Species recipes are drawn from US Forest Service Silvics and interpreted for a regional screening workflow. Refine local prescriptions with Québec’s species comparison tool. Preferences are not physiological survival limits.
How a site is evaluated
A known moisture mismatch or failed site/stock review gives “do not plant as entered.” Missing required evidence gives “unknown.” pH or light outside a preference, or a terrain review flag, gives “review.” A match is a habitat candidate for field assessment. Evidence coverage is not a suitability score.
What comes from where
Québec LiDAR provides mapped elevation and slope context. Its web slope and wetness layers are display classes. Raw terrain supports numeric slope, heat load and roughness; the public lookup reads only small byte ranges from government ground and catchment TWI rasters.
SoilGrids supplies 250 m modelled pH where available. The WCS coverage service returns pH 5.9 for the demo; the REST service was unavailable. ERA5-Land via Open-Meteo provides recent surface moisture at approximately 11 km support. It does not measure planting-hole drainage.
Field soil moisture, drainage, light, chemistry, hazards and stock suitability remain essential. A single RGB image cannot reveal ground slope beneath canopy or measure soil pH.
Downloaded climate and field observations
Open Canada catalogue records link to Québec 1991–2020 station normals and the National Pedon Database. The page charts the nearest station within 150 km and maps up to five soil profiles within 100 km. Each profile retains its observation year, distance, horizon depths and pH method. Regional climate is available evidence; local seed-stock approval remains a separate check. Nearby soil observations are never assigned to the planting coordinate. Soil-order polygons are queried from AAFC’s national service.
Terrain rules
Heat load uses McCune–Keon equation 3 within its 30–60°N, ≤60° slope domain. Roughness is 3×3 maximum minus minimum elevation; the provisional 0.5 m flag requires a 1 m ground DTM. The 35° slope flag and 0.95 heat-load flag are prompts for review. Wetness has no calibrated species cutoff here.
Regional scope
Rouyn-Noranda and Québec selections use approximate research envelopes. They are not official boundaries, seed zones or ecological types. All planting stock needs local climate, provenance and pest review. No evidence is carried automatically from one coordinate to another.
Demo image
The original result.tif is a large georeferenced byte image. Only a 1024×731 preview is sent to the browser. Preparation uses one CPU core, a 32 MiB GDAL cache and no GPU. Live pointer and click coordinates use the original affine transform and CRS through local Proj4js. No environmental values are inferred from image colors.