EFFORTE project group held a meeting at Agroscope research institute in Zürich, Switzerland on November 2018. Year 2019 will be the final year for the project, as it approaches its end on August. Next year will be also a very busy one, since most of the results are to come and there is a lot to communicate – both to academia and to industry.
At the meeting all work packages presented their work and possible preliminary results to rest of the group. To some of those you can already dive in: the latest newsletter presents recent work done in Efficient silviculture work package. Stay tuned for other news: during the spring we will publish news about trafficability, models and applications for forestry using big data and much more.
The recommendations for forest operations in each country were also discussed: the starting point for the work might be very different in each of the countries. Some countries have already regulations for e.g. rut depth (Finland), but might lack the best tools on how to predict and minimize it. Others, such as Scotland, would get a lot of benefits from better resolution maps – solutions vary a lot from simple to complicated. What seem to be common for all are enhanced dialogue, knowledge transfer and data sharing between all parties from very first steps of the operation planning until the very end. In the next newsletter you learn more about French way to work on common understanding and better dialogue.
As a final treat the project group heard a presentation about Timbertrail, which is an application created by one of the project partners, Creative Optimization Ltd. The purpose of the app is to develop a field-adapted application that identifies optimal driving routes for forest machines. Information about e.g. soil moisture, shapes of the terrain, density of the forest, weather etc. is used in cooperation with an optimization model to calculate where the machines should run to minimize the risk of damages while optimizing the harvesting work. The goal is to reduce damage to soils, reduce CO2 emissions and decrease the costs of forest operations. The application was tested on 54 sites and preliminary results show that more than a half of the users found out that the application actually saved their time. In almost all sites the application gave usable suggestions of main extraction routes.
Final seminar of EFFORTE project will be held in Helsinki, Finland on 17-19 June 2019. Save the date!