Find the new track before the clearing behind it.

An auditor plans the surveillance visit from the management plan and the operator's map of approved roads. The sampling areas are picked from the desk, and the real picture arrives on the site walk: a haul road that isn't on the map, a spur running off it, skid trails fanning out into a block nobody has cleared on paper. The finding goes into the report and becomes a corrective action request. The felling is already under way.

An enforcement analyst gets there from the other side. Patrol reports, tip-offs and a canopy-loss layer tell you where trees have gone. The layer is honest about what it is: it fires when the canopy is already open. The road that let the crew in was built earlier, and nothing you had flagged it.

Both jobs depend on the same gap. The road exists before the loss does, and the visit is planned around a map that does not show it. A monthly scan that lists each new track segment inside your boundary moves the first sighting ahead of the clearing, so the next site walk or patrol starts from a list rather than a hunch.

1. 2.1

   New-track alert list

   CSV

   One row per new track segment found since the last pass, with a segment ID and its position, and, if you send your approved roads, sorted so that the ones farthest from them come first. It goes into the audit planning sheet or the patrol schedule.

2. 2.2

   Track segment map layer

   GeoPackage or shapefile

   New tracks drawn over the existing ones, for QGIS or ArcGIS. Each segment carries the date of the pass it first showed up on.

3. 2.3

   Concession-boundary overlay

   Same file as the map layer

   Your own boundary, loaded as supplied, so a segment reads as inside, outside or on the edge of the monitoring area. Send your approved road network as well and segments that run along it are marked as matching existing roads.

4. 2.4

   Monthly change summary

   PDF or CSV

   One page for the audit file or the case file: how many new segments this month, where they cluster, and which passes were clear enough to count. The first delivery sets the baseline; changes show from the second pass on.

1. 1

   Area in

   Send the concession or monitoring-area boundary. If you have the approved road network, send that too.

2. 2

   A monthly pass

   We take the clearest high-resolution pass we can get over your area each month, at 0.5 m or finer.

3. 3

   Change against the last pass

   New linear features are picked out by comparing the pass with the one before. The first pass is the baseline, so it reports nothing as new.

4. 4

   The monthly delivery

   The alert list, the map layer and the change summary arrive together. A month with no usable image says so in the summary instead of arriving blank.

Between audit visits

Read the list when you plan the next visit. A segment that appeared since the last one is a reason to change the sampling, or to pull a site check forward. The same list tells an enforcement coordinator which block to send the next patrol into. What a segment means, whether it is permitted, agreed or a breach, is decided by your team with the plan and permit in hand.

1. L1

   Monthly, not continuous

   It is one scan a month. A track cut on the second day of the month waits for the next pass. It is not a live feed.

2. L2

   Resolution floor

   At 0.5 m or finer a wide haul road can cover several pixels, but a single faint skid trail may be only a pixel or two wide. Narrow trails, and the first single pass of a machine across bare ground, may not register until they widen or get reused.

3. L3

   Canopy and cloud

   A road under closed canopy is hidden from above, and so is one in heavy shadow. Cloud stops a pass outright, and a cloudy month can push the next usable image out. Whatever we could not see is noted in the monthly summary.

4. L4

   It finds features, not breaches

   The scan reports that a track is there and that it is new. It does not know your permit, your plan or your boundary agreements, and it does not say whether a track is legal.

5. L5

   Start of the record

   The first pass is the baseline, so comparisons across seasons only begin once you have run the scan that long.