Offline block boundaries
Published once by the organization, versioned, distributed to every crew device before the shift.
Industries · Resource · Whitepaper
Cut blocks have no coverage.
Silviculture and harvest crews work inside the exact coverage hole that consumer navigation apps treat as an edge case. The block is under canopy, the road is unmapped, the boundary is a legal instrument, and the crew is beyond cellular for the whole shift.
01 / Problem statement
What actually goes wrong.
A forestry operation generates three geospatial obligations that a recreational app is not built to carry.
The boundary is legal. A cut-block boundary, a riparian reserve, a wildlife tree patch and a cultural heritage buffer are not annotations. Crossing one is a compliance event with a financial and sometimes criminal consequence. That means the boundary layer has to be authoritative, versioned, and available on a device with no signal — and the license on the underlying data has to permit its use in a deliverable.
The road network is not in a car router. Forest service roads, spur roads, decommissioned grades and seasonal deactivations are precisely the network that OSM-derived car routing declines to touch. A crew that follows a consumer route into a deactivated grade with a loaded truck is a recovery operation.
The crew is alone. Faller, bucker and machine operator work beyond line of sight of each other and beyond cellular for eight to twelve hours. Lone-worker check-in is a regulatory requirement in most jurisdictions, and a check-in that depends on cellular is not a check-in.
02 / Mechanism
How NavTrax addresses each one.
Each entry names the mechanism rather than the benefit, so it can be evaluated rather than believed.
- Boundary layers as organization data
- A cut-block polygon published by the organization appears for every member scoped by role, versioned, with the tile epoch recorded. When the boundary is amended, the crew sees the amendment date, not a silently changed line.
- Road network beyond the car graph
- Forest service and unmaintained roads come from the transport layer set and route through the trail graph rather than OSRM, with surface preference and seasonal deactivation as constraints.
- Canopy-aware coverage prediction
- The signal predictor models terrain occlusion. Under closed canopy the honest answer is that there is no coverage, and the app schedules the check-in against the last position where there was.
- Lone-worker check-in over mesh
- Scheduled check-ins escalate over group broadcast and mesh before they reach for cellular, so a missed check-in in a valley bottom still escalates.
- Canopy and forest-loss layers
- ESA WorldCover at 10 m, Global Forest Watch for near-real-time loss, and CORINE or NLCD for the regional inventory — each with its license stated so the output can be used commercially.
03 / Capabilities
In the field, this is what you have.
Road-aware routing to the landing
Through the forest network, with surface and seasonal closure as routing constraints.
Lone-worker compliance
Scheduled check-ins with automatic escalation over mesh, and an audit record of every attempt.
Harvest and silviculture capture
Structured field capture against the block, syncing when any channel returns.
Fire and smoke awareness
NASA FIRMS active fire detections and smoke layers, which decide whether the shift happens at all.
Audit trail
Every position, check-in and boundary version recorded, which is what turns an incident into a defensible report.
04 / Reference
| Layer | Provider | Resolution / cadence | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| ESA WorldCover | ESA | 10 m, annual | Free |
| Global Forest Watch | WRI | Near-real-time loss | Creative Commons |
| CORINE Land Cover | EEA / Copernicus | 100 m, 6-year | Free |
| US NLCD | USGS / MRLC | 30 m, 5-year | Public domain |
| Canada Land Cover | NRCan | 30 m, 5-year | Open Government |
| USGS 3DEP | USGS | 1 m LiDAR where flown | Public domain |
| NASA FIRMS | NASA | Active fire, 3-hourly | NASA Open Data |
05 / Process
Traced, node by node.
The boundary is the deliverable.
Custom and organization layers are Pro. RBAC, audit logging and provisioning are Enterprise.