A pilot initiative has offered a new solution for sustainable forestry. It’s part of a series of activities that handle massive data flows collected through sensors and aerial and satellite imagery. The importance of a well-functioning bioeconomy is increasingly recognised in addressing challenges like climate change, natural resource scarcity and unsustainable consumption patterns. Source: Timberbiz
Defined as an economy in which food, materials and energy are derived from renewable biological resources involving the land and the sea, bioeconomy is seen as a central component of sustainable development.
To support its growth, the EU-funded DataBio project has been focusing on the production of raw materials from agriculture, forestry and fishery through 26 pilot trials executed by 48 partners from 17 countries and involving more than 100 organisations.
As part of these initiatives, the Finnish partners have developed, among others, a mobile application that uses Big Data for forest management.
Seppo Huurinainen from MHG Systems Oy Ltd, who coordinates DataBio project’s forestry pilots said: “One of the Finnish consortium’s innovations is a globally unique concept based on forestry standards, which allows landowners and forestry operators to collect data on their forests using a smartphone and upload the data to the Finnish Forest Centre’s forest resource database with the help of an application called Wuudis.”
Huurinainen says the application “facilitates the payment of sustainable forestry subsidies and makes it easier to collect information and keep forest inventories up to date.”
Project partner VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd said: “The Wuudis service and the associated mobile application as well as standardized forest resource data concept provided by the Finnish Forest Centre can be easily scaled to other countries.”
The application can also be used to monitor the effects of storms, snow, pests and diseases, according the news item. It also notes that another Finnish pilot has developed a service concept based on inventorying forests using drones.
It emphasises that thousands of hectares of forest have already been inventoried with the help of this service.
The project “proposes to deploy a state-of-the-art, big data platform on top of the existing partners’ infrastructure and solutions – the Big DATABIO Platform.” In addition to Big Data, the platform utilises Earth observation technologies and ICT.
As part of its overall methodology, DataBio collaborates with end users and will “proceed to verify the concept through several pilotings in the chosen sectors.”
Forestry pilots include areas such as forest damage remote sensing, invasive alien species control and monitoring, and a web-mapping service for government decision making.
