World Wide Heuristics Solutions

TCruise Features

Timber Cruise (TCruise) is a professional level timber cruise program that can process plot, point, double point, or segmented strip cruises from stratified, or non-stratified tracts. The Microsoft Windows interface makes the creation of cruise templates for an organization a breeze. Once these templates are created they provide the initial setup for differing cruising conditions, timber types, and size classes. Changes in the cruise templates are only needed if timber prices, or merchandising specifications change.

The reports generated by TCruise range from the compact Executive summary showing timber volumes, values, sampling errors, and estimated required sample sizes by product, and species group to a detailed accounting by dbh class. All species groups can be combined into a single group, to provide bottom line volumes, values, sampling errors, and estimated required samples sizes by product and in the aggregate. The volume units reported by TCruise are cubic feet inside, and outside bark, cords, green tons, cunits, and Doyle, Scribner, and International-1/4" board feet volume. The product groups defined for TCruise are pulpwood, chip and saw, or tie timber, peeler, sawlog, and cull. Revision 3.00 of TCruise will allow the user to define, and add up to 5 additional product groups. The revision should be available for purchase by December 2000. A version of TCruise called TCruise Professional (TCruisePro) that will allow for the processing of cruise data by log grade, and product is under devolopment. TCruisePro will be introduced in late 2001.

Cruise data can be entered from tally sheets using TCruise's built-in spread sheet interface, or imported from an ascii text file. The ascii import file format is designed to accomodate the data from most data recorders so only a minimal effort should be required to rewrite your data recorder download module to output data in TCruise format. The TCruise companion products Timber Cruise for the Haglof Digitech Professional Computer Caliper (TCruise DP), and Timber Cruise Windows CE, or Palm OS (TCWinCE), download ascii formatted cruise data that can be imported directly into TCruise.

The paper tally input screen allows for the rapid input of data recorded by dbh, and usable height classes expressed as logs and half logs.

Tree volumes are calculated from tree profile functions built into the program. Simply select the profile function that best matches each of your species from the list of 100 built-in profile functions. The profile functions in the current version of TCruise provides excellent coverage for the tree species in the South, and Southeastern US. Some coverage of the Northeast is provided by the Mesavage form class taper tables, along with a few profile functions. The next revision will provide better coverage of the Northeastern US. While we will do a literature search to find additional profile functions for the Southern and Northeastern US, if you would like to have a specific profile function added to TCruise, send us a copy of the publication describing the function, and if possible we will include the function in the next revision. Our goal is to have complete coverage for the Eastern US by the end of 2001.

A timber cruise program that uses profile functions has two advantages over the programs that use tables or simple volume functions. First the end user is freed from the difficulty of obtaining, inputting, and managing a set of tables. Secondly, and most importantly, changes in merchandising specification are easily accomodated by simply changing the specifications for a species group. TCruise's merchandising specification editor, allows the specifications for any species group to be changed in seconds. To rebuild tables to reflect changes in specifications, could take hours, or even days.

TCruise also fully supports the entry of user defined volume equations, ratio equations, and volume tables to allow for the use of old mensurational data to obtain tree volume estimates. The volume table manager allows for the importation, and exportation of ASCII text volume tables in either published, or statistical analysis formats. The volume equation manager fully supports the affine generalization of the allometric, and combined variable volume equations.

While TCruise has built-in tree profile functions for many species, it may not have a profile function suitable for all of your comercial tree species. To provide the individual user a mechanism for independently expanding TCruise's profile function list, a program called Tree Profile Fitter (TProfile) was developed. This companion product allow the user to collect tree profile data on sample trees of the desired species, input the data using a spread sheet interface, and fit a selected tree profile function to the data. The fitted profile function can then be imported into TCruise, or TVolume and used like a built-in function. TProfile makes it easy to expand TCruise to meet your requirements. The program Tree Volume Equation and Table Generator (TVolume) incapsulates all of the 100 tree profile equations built into TCruise, into a program that can produce local or standard volume equations or tables for most species in the Southern, and South Eastern US. These equations or tables can imported into other cruise programs, or used to develop programs to cruise for speciality products.

TCruise provides an extensive facility for the collection of permanent plot data, and custom defined data at the tract, plot, and tree levels. Custom defined data fields can be text, or numeric edit fields, or dropdown, or droplist combo boxes. Previous tree measurement can be displayed for permanent plots to reduce data recordin errors. Custom fields can be made read only.

The major features of TCruise are

• Un-stratified, or stratified Plot, point, or double point sample designs
• Timber trespass cruises un-stratified, or stratified
• Forward, and backward stand table projection
• Template based cruise setup facility
• User definable species codes/names, species groups names, product codes/names, and grade codes/names
• Spread sheet tree data input screen on desktop, and Windows CE handhelds
• Ability to hide, and reorder spread sheet tree data input columns to meet any cruise situation
• Ability to select the volume units to report. TCruise reports volumes in cubic feet (ib, and ob), cunits, tons, weight cords, and Doyle, Scribner, and International boardfeet.
• Stumpage price editor, and stumpage value reports
• Creation of re-measurement, and audit cruises from any TCruise cruise document, or from external data sources via a custom dynamic link library (dll)
• Separate reproduction, sub-merchantable, pulpwood, and sawtimber plot/BAF factors
• Automatically accommodates height sub-sampling
• Pre-, and post-stratification
• Unlimited numbers of strata
• Detailed volume reports by product, grade, and dbh class
• Reports for any combination of species, or species group
• Complete statistical reliability reports
• Custom report, data import, data export, and result export dll facility
• Custom dlls for exporting results to Microsoft Excel, and Access, Oracle, SQl, FoxPro, and other databases
• Custom dll procedures to permit the importation of user defined volume/weight equations, volume/weight tables, and profile functions
• Comprehensive data error checker
• Cruises can be split by strata, plot identifiers, measurer, measurement time, and user definable tree categories such as cut, or leave
• Tree log grading, and merchandizing processing and reporting
• Profile function, and weight factor dll facility for the implementation of proprietary equations
• Administrator username/password protection of codes and parameters to prevent unauthorized changes
• Paper tally input by dbh, and numbers of logs, and half logs. A on screen dot-dash tally.
• Built-in tree profile/taper functions for many species
• Supports the Mesavage form class tables, Behre's hyperbola, and Tariff tables
• Custom data fields at the tract, plots, and tree levels through a custom design wizard
• Volume table, and volume equation editor
• Ability to cruise by tree (log) averaging
• Custom report, and stand/stock table designer
• Imports data from TCruise for Windows CE, and other field data recorder software through custom dlls
• Exports reports to text files for easy importation to WORD, or Wordperfect documents
• Program can be easily customized with add-on dlls or automation components
• Supports user definable profile functions through TProfile
• Allows the input and automatic detection of local height, form class, and dbh growth equations
• Supports user definable volume equations. Volume tables are supported by fitting a volume equation to a table using TVolume
• Timed, and auto backup of data
• Ability to automatically launch tool programs, and programs to post process the cruise results placed in files, or databases by TCruise custom dlls

Download TCruise and take it for a 30-day test drive. We think you will like the interface, auto merchandising feature, and the other nice features that are too numerous to mention on a web page.

Some advanced features of TCruise desktop may not work properly in Windows 95, 98, or Me.
We recommend that you upgrade your OS to Windows 2000 Professional, or Windows XP Professional
to ensure that TCruise is fully functional on your system.