Last year was busy for 💡 🌲 SmartForest, and we are excited to spotlight some of the innovations we worked on in our mission to revolutionize forestry through enabling technologies!
🔦 ForestSens is a cloud-based platform for implementing AI in the forest sector, utilizing sensors and data across the entire value chain. ForestSens offers various app solutions for drones (DroneSens), forest machines (HarvestSens), roads (RoadSens), sawmills (MillSens), and planting (PlantSens). Throughout 2023, ForestSens and its various components were further developed.
🔦 Highly detailed forest information is essential for adapting forestry practices to a changing climate while maintaining sustainable forestry, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services. High-density laser data from various sources (aircraft, drones, helicopters, ground-based) provide different forms of information. In 2023, we developed models and algorithms to identify individual trees (instance segmentation) and tree components (semantic segmentation) based on these different data sources. Additionally, a benchmark dataset was developed to further enhance our ability to identify and segment individual trees, characterize forest structures, and obtain in-situ measurements from drone laser scanning data.
🔦 The forest road network is key for continuous and predictable access to forests for forestry, logging, and timber transport. This became evident in 2023 following ‘Hans’, where parts of forestry were affected due to extensive damage to the forest road network caused by large amounts of water. We have further developed a new sensor platform to collect and analyze road information for the preparation of maps indicating for example maintenance needs.
🔦 A demonstration area was established to develop and showcase the digital value chain by implementing technologies and methods developed in the various work packages. The demonstration area was established in collaboration with Solør videregående skole and Åsnes Municipality Forests. Here, data is collected along the value chain that is or will be integrated into our cloud-based platform, ForestSens. This demonstration area will, in the future, be able to illustrate the cumulative effect of digitizing a wide range of processes along the value chain.
image credits: 📷 Stefano Puliti, Carolin Fischer, Mostafa Hoseini