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Natural Resources
Real Estate
The Tribal Real Estate Program provides land leases in coordinating land use activities to tribal members and to other entities. The land leases provided are agricultural, house sites, trailer sites, individual businesses, Tribal entity businesses, rights of way, and Tribal administrative sites. Real estate also provides vehicle affidavit services to Tribal members that reside on Tribal land. A land lease is provided with a survey plat and description. A field survey is conducted to collect data and description. A field survey is conducted to collect data and recordation for the lease.
Forestry Activities
The Tribal Forestry Department is involved in all aspects of forest management. One area is timber harvesting. Tribal timber resources are managed to maintain long term forest health. In an effort to accomplish this goal, selective timber harvesting is don periodically based on current stand conditions. Community and industrial developments also increase timber harvesting activity.
Determining the timing and scheduling of timber harvests involves forest measurements such as tree diameters, heights and growth rates. The method of measuring trees with a diameter tape.
The Forestry Program is also responsible for conducting prescribed burns, herbicide applications for site preparation, reforestation, timber stand improvements, and forest pest management.
GIS (Choctaw Geographic Information Services)
GIS is a computerized system designed to efficiently capture, store, update, manipulate, analyze, and display all forms of geographically referenced information. Any object or feature on the surface of the earth that occupies space has coordinates and can be included and described in a GIS.
Kind of Questions that GIS Can Answer
- What is there? It searches for what is there at a particular location.
- Where is that? It seeks to find out a location where certain conditions are met. For example: a non-forested area at least 21,528 square feet in size, within 300 feet of a road, and with the right soils to support construction.
- What has changed? This question might need the input from the first two questions and it is basically looking at the difference within an area over time.
Applications of GIS
GIS is a general purpose tool with many applications. Some of them are land registration systems, environmental databases, utility systems, topographic databases, computerized description of transportation networks, automated mapping and facilities management for electricity, water, sewer, gas and telecommunications. Resource managers use GIS for wildlife, forest, agricultural, coastal land management, as well as energy and mineral management. GIS is also widely used in education and research.
How the Tribe Developed Choctaw GIS
It started in 1992 as a pilot study of the MBCI Natural Resource Department, to provide effective information for the tribal natural resource management. The preliminary equipment and technical assistance were financed through a grant, by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, In 1994 the Tribe decided to hire a fulltime GIS coordinator. At the beginning, all of the GIS work was done via a telephone line through the BIA Geographic Data Service Center in Denver, Colorado. Later in 1995, based on the effectiveness of the information generated by the Choctaw GIS to fulfill the new objective: provide effective geographic information to all tribal offices or businesses.
Environmental Program
The Environmental Program Office coordinates a reservation-wide testing of tribal homes and buildings for Radon gas as part of a Radon Pilot Project funded by the U.S. Environmental Program Office. Radon field technicians, deploy, collect, and tag Radon test canisters before shipment to the Radon National Laboratory in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Environmental Program Office operates a very successful recycling program located in the Pearl River Indian Reservation community. Cardboard and white office paper are baled at the Choctaw Recycling Center with the assistance of Environmental Technicians. Aluminum cans are also bought from the public. This is an income generating project and substantially reduces the Tribe's solid waste disposal costs.
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