FCTools - ForChange

The ForChange group works in the areas of forest resources inventory and modeling. As a result of several national and international research projects undergoing in these areas, the group has been developing several tools that aim to support forest management. Considerable efforts have been put into the development of several growth and yield models that have been integrated in stand and regional forest level simulators. 

Being part of Centro de Estudos Florestais, the work developed has been mainly disseminated at academic level at Instituto Superior de Agronomia being sometimes difficult to extend its dissemination, which not only compromises the knowledge transfer to the end user, but also narrows the cooperation opportunities that could bring more added value to the technical and scientific development of forest management.    

As a research group, ForChange is responsible for the constant development of new tools combined with the continuous improvement of the existing ones.

Forchange Tools website was created with the purpose of facilitating the access of all users to the existing tools allowing downloading its latest versions (registration required). In FcTools the user will find the descriptions of the models and simulators developed for the main tree species in Portugal.

There are several tools listed on the website so far:

Portuguese Cimate Normals 1960-1990 is an application that, by suppliyng a list of "ID, X , Y", detects the nearest weather station and calculates statistics of climate variables (sum, average, variance) for months chosen by the user.

Climate Picker is a tool that allows to obtain climatic variables (HadRM3Q0 ENSEMBLES) by selecting a location of interest on a map (Google maps), where the interface will search for the nearest climatic station .

WebCorky is a tool that allows the estimation of cork caliber evolution from different cork samples.

To obtain other tools user have to register first and access the Downloads menu.