Towards more climate-sustainable and diverse logging through sensor technology and accurate geographical information (IlmoStar)

Participants

Finnish Geospatial Research Institute FGI, Univerity of Eastern Finland (UEF), Natural Resources Institute (LUKE), Ponsse Ltd

Project description

Duration: 2023-2025

In 2020, growing and final felling was carried out in Finnish forests on more than 700,000 hectares, of which the vast majority was thinning or removal of overgrowth. The most significant challenge of the harvesting footprint of thinning fellings is currently the management of the thinning intensity, in 2021 only just under 20% of the inventoried thinning sites were estimated to be in accordance with the recommendations. Improving the location accuracy of logging machines together with machine vision technologies would enable a new and more versatile mapping of the structural diversity of forest nature in connection with logging, which would further create excellent opportunities for the development of systems that assist the driver of the forest machine and the construction of energy- and resource-efficient, climate-resistant harvesting that increases the diversity of forest nature.

The focus of the project is the felling machine of the future, whose positioning and mobile laser
scanning systems improve the implementation of climate-resistant wood harvesting that takes
into account the diversity of forest nature. The work of the project supports the development of
precise forest management and tree harvesting, taking into account the valuable habitats of
forest nature and protected and conserved nature sites more precisely than before. The
technology to be studied supports the development of a method in which the driver can be guided to the forest treatment in connection with the location-specific logging, which best maintains and strengthens the carbon sinks and stores in the long term, as well as produces location- and volume-accurate information about the remaining trees and measures and documents the diversity of the harvesting footprint and forest nature at the logging site. The methods are suitable for producing more comprehensive information about the status and development of economic forests than before. This information can be used to produce more accurate and up-to-date information about changes in forest carbon sequestration and diversity.

Additional information
Research professor Harri Kaartinen, tel. +358 40 192 0836, harri.kaartinen@nls.fi