Digital Pre-Planting
Updated April 10, 2026
This article applies to:
- Terrain Forestry
- RoadEng Forestry
This section contains a tutorial for the Version 12 Digital Pre-Planting Tool. Please download the associated files here.
This tutorial covers how to use the Digital Pre-Plant Tool (available as of RoadEng Version 12). The tool is intended to be used as part of a workflow to help automate planting/thinning layout to accommodate machine operability constraints on moderate and steep slopes. Specifically, it creates rows and points along those rows that are oriented with the slope to:
- Minimize the loss of productive forest caused by clearing trails that do not respect desired trail and tree spacing.
- Limit excessive cross-fall along machine travel routes, thereby reducing rollover risk.
The Digital Pre-Plant Tool runs on selected polygon(s), and its inputs include:
- Row spacing - Distance between adjacent rows.,
- Point spacing along rows - Distance between consecutive tree positions within a row.,
- Minimum number of trees per row,
- Azimuth of row orientation - Direction in which rows are aligned. If set to "Auto", orientation is automatically derived from the slope aspect of each feature.
- Connect points along row to form polyline - If enabled, each row will be output as a connected polyline rather than as individual points.
- Symbology options – Controls how generated points are displayed.
The following figure illustrates the output of the tool according to some of the input parameters.
Figure 1 – Diagram illustrating parameter definitions.
In general, the tool is best utilized with features derived from topographic information. To accomplish this, a typical workflow includes several key steps:
- Data Import & Terrain Modeling
- Create polygons from terrain topography,
- Run the Digital Pre-Planting Tool, and
- Output