Traditionally, forestry is a local business activity with country specific practices. The basic metric of forestry is forest management plan, which is usually updated every 10-15 years. The forest management and monitoring services are offered as consultancy by experts. Those experts usually use various types of forest data sources: field data, aerial images, sometime satellite data and modelling tools to offer management plans and monitoring services. Usually, maps and report (as document) are provided related to forest inventory and health status of the forest. This is often static information which is not updated at regular interval. To update those documents, additional consultancy services are required which increase the cost of producing regular information.
ICT4Forest aims to address the need to update at regular intervals the monitoring and management of forests by harmonizing different sources of forest data and Earth Observation data into one digital platform in a cost-effective and seamless way.
The service we proposed consists of integrated dynamic forest monitoring and management features. Firstly, the service solves the problem of forest resource data being static (which is usually offered as maps/GeoTiff images and reports etc.), by updating it more frequently and making it available over an IT platform for further use in day to day business. Secondly, the service solves the problem of low penetration of digital tools in forestry by offering a service which is harmonized and which offers one unique service to run the entire forest business instead of multiple reports, excel sheets, static maps and apps.
In practice, ICT4Forest service will evolve through fusion between Wuudis service components for forest management and SPACEBEL satellite data expertise in forest monitoring domain. Alongside, the service will be offered to early customers at reduced price to become fore-runner organization in forest data digitalization.
More information:
Sudip Kumar Pal, Business Developer, Wuudis Solutions Oy
sudip.kumar@wuudis.com
Stephanie Bonnet, Remote Sensing Engineer, SPACEBEL SA
stephanie.bonnet@spacebel.be
Pietro Ceccato, Business Unit Manager, SPACEBEL SA
pietro.ceccato@spacebel.be
Anouk Ville, Remote Sensing Engineer, SPACEBEL SA
anouk.ville@spacebel.be