Operations Australian Forestry Survey Coy

for tree. Compared with the data which could be gathered from air photos of temperate forests, the amount of quantitative data that could be obtained from air photos of the overly complex mixed forests of the tropics was disappointing. Nevertheless, the photos proved a boon for qualitative interpretation and saved a considerable amount of work in the field by eliminating areas which need not be further investigated and allowed the team to concentrate detailed work on those areas with the greatest productive potential. If they did nothing else the air photos enabled the production of the 1 mile to 1-inch Army series of maps which now covered the northern coastline of New Guinea, Manus, New Britain, and Bougainville. They used those sheets as their basic maps and from the air photos transferred the vegetative data to these sheets, which were then forwarded to the field units as survey instructions for checking in the field. The sheets were arranged in a priority system based on operational requirements. By the time the unit was disbanded, the air phot interpretation for all the published 1 mile to 1-inch series (some 260 odd in number) had been completed but only 59 of the field reports had been finalised. Vegetation mapping included officers as Les Carron.

Lae 9/11/1944 Warrant Officer 2 W Spencer using stereoscope on aerial photographs 1 Forest Survey Coy. Photo credit Australian War Memorial.

Operations Australian Forestry Survey Coy

Australian Forestry Survey Coy Units were then located where they could be of optimal use to the allies and at the same time meeting McAdam’s main goals of recording the volume felled by the Allies identifying likely productive forests and felling and milling timber. The Forest Survey Units were to record the utilization activities, and to make surveys of forest resources using all the available military resources of aerial photography, operational mapping, and transport. The Units, during the resource survey, gave valuable intelligence data on topography, tracks, anchorages etc. On the areas of easier topography and better forest cover, they laid down actual sample plots and obtained an estimate of the actual timber over a measured acreage. They collected botanical and wood samples of new species. By the end of the war, the units

had collected over 1,500 sheets. The botanists had worked through 620 of them and had listed 295 separate species. These collections formed the basis of the herbarium at Lae. Since then, the Forest Botanist role was to expand the collection to prepare a flora for the Territory. Great assistance was provided by the late Mr C T White, the Queensland Government Botanist, who came to the Territory and ran a botanical school for the Units during the training period.

Lae 9/11/1944; Lt J S Talbot Surveyor; WO 2 W Spencer Draughtsman and Sgt H M Crossley outside drawing office of 1 Forest Survey Coy 1944. Photo credit Australian War Memorial.

Copies of the wood samples were sent to the Division of Forest Products of the CSIRO in Melbourne, where Dr. Dadswell accompanied Mr White and lectured to the Australian Forestry School on Wood Technology. The early work of the Division of Forest Products quickly resulted in the development of a card sorting key for the identification of the more common species and the Division later developed similar keys for the Forces as they moved onto Borneo and Malaya. Two years of intensive work in resource inventory was carried out. Using aerial photographs and criteria evolved from field correlation studies, vegetation types were mapped over an area of some 56,000 square miles, about 30 per cent of the total land area, on one inch to the mile military maps. By the end of the war nearly a quarter of the vegetation mapping had been ground checked. This work provided an excellent base for post-war forestry development.

It mapped and assessed forest areas throughout the country, its work forming the basis of post-war forest planning and industrial expansion, especially during the last few decades. It pioneered the use of aerial photos to map and verify tropical vegetation, and kept resource and production statistics, partly to compensate landowners.

The units were gradually phased out towards the end of 1945, after the war in the south-west Pacific had ended. In a paper presented to the Fifth National Conference on Australian Forest History18 by Judith A. Bennett, Department of History, University of Otago, New Zealand titled “Allied logging and milling in Papua New Guinea during World War 11 it was estimated conservatively, that

18 Fifth National Conference on Australian Forest History edited by John Dargavel, Denise Gaughwin and Brenda Libbis in 2002 ISBN 0867405309.