Peter Oduor, associate professor of geology, received the 2011 North Dakota Forest Service Trees Bowl Distinguished Service Award during a recognition ceremony on Sept. 10 at the Fargodome.
The award is presented to an individual who exhibits enthusiastic promotion of forestry principles and practices, including fire mitigation, protection and suppression; tree planting, preservation, or maintenance; community forestry efforts, forest management practices; forest recreation; or environmental education.
During the awards ceremony, NDSU President Dean L. Bresciani and State Forester Larry Kotchman presented each winner with a special Trees Awards plaque and limited edition centennial trees print.
Oduor and the North Dakota Forest Service have a long history of working together. He and his students helped initiate and complete a wide range of projects for North Dakota Forest Service. After meetings with stakeholders and numerous partners, Oduor and his students developed several online reporting modules with North Dakota state forest staff. “Larry Kotchman shared with us his vision of implementing all resource management on digital platforms including handheld PDAs, Toughbooks or cell phones,” said Oduor. “Most of these reporting modules can be completed on standard field-based platforms, iPads and any smartphone, since they are designed on Glare-Free forms.”
The North Dakota Forest Service and NDSU Department of Geosciences partnership began with a unique methodology to digitize, map and prioritize potential Forest Stewardship acres, information that is available at www.fs.fed.us/na/sap/products/index.shtml, and provided base layers for North Dakota forest resources as an integral component of the recently launched WebDET. Oduor and his students also recently mapped the flooded forest acreage along the Souris and Missouri Rivers within North Dakota, information that has been shared with the N.D. State Department of Emergency Management and N.D. Information Technology Department.