The MENU project aims at upgrading the MELA software into a new software ecosystem to serve especially the calculation of national and regional felling potentials, projections in the land use sector, as well as scenario and impact assessments for energy and climate policies. The software can also be used in optimising the management of private forest owners’ forest resources.
The project has been divided into three work packages, which overlap in time to some extent. Below you can also see what points of communication and interaction we have planned:
The work package on dataset interface and structure of the model function library will carry out a standardised dataset interface for the Finnish National Forest Inventory (NFI) and a model function library primarily for the use of later work packages, and further develop the pre-processing of NFI materials as a part of these tasks. Our communication includes:
- In our news, we are going to tell about the benefits of the utilisation of the NFI dataset.
- We will be writing scientific publications which we expect to be published in 2021.
- In our blog, we will describe the results of our work within this work package.
- During the establishment of the model function library, interaction with various experts is crucial as we need feedback on our plans and the process we have designed. Later, we will also need content, i.e. model functions, in the library.
- A discussion forum will be established on our website to allow interaction between the experts involved and to provide a channel for open feedback.
- An expert workshop will be organised.
The work package on the search and inference engine for calculation chains will develop a tool for researchers based on NFI dataset interface and tree-specific models, especially apt for calculating national-level felling potentials, greenhouse gas projections as well as scenario and impact assessments for energy and climate policies.Our communication includes:
- In our blog, we are going to write about how the work is progressing and about various points of discussion.
The work package on the extension of dataset interface and applications for simulation and optimization will produce a whole MELA software ecosystem, which makes use of both the NFI datasets and the dataset interface of the Finnish Forest Centre, and is able to take into account areas larger than only one specific forest plot when planning cost-effective forest management operations that also minimise environmental impacts and ensure equal treatment of land owners.
- In our series of instruction blogs, cases used in Mela 2.0 are presented and we will give concrete examples of its applications.
- An expert workshop will be arranged.
- The applications will be featured in our news.
The project will run through the years 2019-2022.