Tim Payn

Tim Payn's forest-science career began with a background in soil science and chemistry. He completed a joint honours degree at the University College of North Wales in 1980 and a forestry doctorate at the University of Canterbury in 1992. His work includes forest nutrition, productivity modelling and decision support. He has also contributed to international sustainable-forest-management policy through the Montreal Process Technical Advisory Committee.

Barbara Höck and Tim Payn, working with J. W. Shirley of Forestry Corporation, had 1,643 forest compartment boundaries in digital form and imported them into ARC/INFO. The compartment identifiers linked 744 known site-index values to the spatial data, while the GIS supplied compartment-centre coordinates to a geostatistical analysis and received the estimated values back for mapping. The job shows a step beyond computerised forest inventory: the forest's management units had become spatial objects that could connect inventory records, statistical estimation and map production.

A 1998 paper by Forest Research scientists Barbara Höck, Tim Payn and Andrew Dunningham shows what this looked like after the institute became a Crown Research Institute. Their work combined remote sensing, permanent sample plots, foliage measurements, soil-map units, GIS and geostatistics. One trial treated satellite pixels as 25-metre ground cells and tested them against measured forest data; another loaded growth and foliage plots into GIS and overlaid them with soil units while the team worked on a better link between MARVL and GIS. Forestry scientists used GIS to compare and analyse their information.