Since 1989, VESTRA has worked with Soper-Wheeler Company to develop and maintain a GIS database and to develop vegetation maps and a forest inventory system for its 100,000 acres in Butte, Plumas, Yuba, Sierra, Mendocino, and Humboldt counties in Northern California. VESTRA worked with Soper-Wheeler to develop base data layers such as section corners and ownership boundaries and to purchase panchromatic satellite imagery to locate features such as roads and conifer plantation boundaries accurately

.The GIS then served as a basis for a forest inventory system that VESTRA designed for Soper-Wheeler, which is now used to process inventory field data and to generate estimates of timber volume, wildlife habitat, and other forest resources.

VESTRA also assisted Soper-Wheeler's forest inventory work by producing maps used by Soper-Wheeler foresters to delineate vegetation types, digitizing vegetation type boundaries, allocating field plots to strata types and to stands, producing inventory field manuals, plot cards, and maps of plot locations, and summarizing inventory data.