Someone put numbered tags on my trees. What does it mean?

[Phorester]

 
Well, I'm probably digging myself a deeper hole here.....,    ;D

Been conversing by email a little with our head FIA dude.  Our FIA people go to the door if their information indicates it's a landowner who lives on the property.  If no one is home, I don't know if they leave any kind of a letter or other notice. Be good if they did. Absentee landowners are not notified beforehand. But..... land changes hands and the FIA people are not privy to it.  This info is easy to track down in some county courthouses, difficult in others. Every county does it differently.  Physical addresses can change especially if the county has switched to a 911 numbering system.  Even that can change every few years. Sometimes on properties that were once owned by an absentee landowner and sold between plot meaurements, a new owner will build a house elsewhere on the property they are unaware of.  If the new landowner has a PO Box mailing address and not a route address, they don't know if he's a resident on the property or not.

They remeasure these plots every 4 - 8 years.  Some of these properties have had a new landowner answer the door every time they've remeasured since the 1940s when it was originally put in (with the first landowners permission).  Some have just been subdivided into house lots, with the current owner impossible to determine. Also, rarely do the same FIA people revisit the same plot on the next measurement.  These are parttime jobs, these guys and gals come and go every few years.

Media articles about these inventories would be nice, but these articles are one-shot-deals at a specific time, and they wouldn't reach every landowner that has such a plot. And if somebody doesn't read the paper or watch the TV news on a particlular day, they don't get the info.   I've had numerous articles over the years about forestry in my local newspaper, and still people will see me the next day or week or month and ask me questions about that same topic that were answered in the article.  They never read it.  A year later it's all been forgotten. They are very hit-or-miss.

People don't get shot, they don't get threatened with being shot.  They do sometimes get threatened with getting arrested for tresspassing. But if the landowner doesn't want them there, they simply thank the owner and leave, and note on the inventory sheet that the landowner didn't want them to measure the plot.  It's not a problem. The last thing the FIA program wants are a bunch of landowners mad at them.  It just doesn't happen that often.

Seems to me the best way to handle it would be for FIA people to leave a notice in the door if no one was at home with a phone number for more infomation.  Absentee landowners could be mailed a letter stating that a crew would visit their property within the next "x" months or the next year. 

[flip]

Well, the shooting thing sounded good at the time.  You could just pull out as many of those nails and tag you can find, put them in a paint can and hang it on a steel pole on the trail with a nice little note "To whom it may concern"

[SwampDonkey]

We don't govern by counties here so much, although we have MLA's for each county. I think  Premier Robichaud ended that with 'equal opportunity'. If something is adopted over in Kings county, it's also implemented here, for example. If the province decides we are going 911, we all go. All addresses are current and maps are updated when the survey is completed and submitted to the survey folks in government. I had a land owner call me about a parcel he just bought and he wanted thinning done. I looked it up and it was already updated in the system.