Editor's note
Two pilots we followed are now fleets.
In #032 a single electric timber truck was running under SCA with a range extender bolted on, and in #042 Billerud inaugurated another and called it the northernmost in the world. This week Skogforsk reports twelve of them, 750,000 kilometres, seven sites from Småland to Norrbotten. In #053 a philanthropic grant paid for three wildfire satellites, in #055 they reached orbit, and this week the company that builds them banked a quarter of a billion dollars.
Neither of those looked like a turning point when we first ran it. That is the case for reading this weekly rather than annually: the moment a technology stops being an experiment is almost never reported as news. It arrives as a larger number in a routine update, written by people who have stopped being surprised by it.
So I will keep running the small ones. Some of them are next year's fleets.
Axel
Muon Space banks 250 million dollars as FireSat enters service
We covered the 26 million dollar grant that put the first three wildfire satellites in orbit back in July. The round that follows is ten times the size, led by Eclipse Capital with Google and Salesforce Ventures joining, and it buys production at constellation scale: 11 satellites flown, more than 50 in the works, 13 booked for launch inside a year. Wildfire detection is now one line in a much larger space-infrastructure business.
SLU flies thermal drones at moose and finds the weather in charge
In cloud, cold and no wind, over reasonably open forest, the team says it found essentially every animal in the area. Sun ruins it: warm rocks read like bodies and heated crowns hide what is underneath. Counting calves and telling bulls from cows needs good conditions, experienced pilots and a lot of desk work afterwards, and some plots have to be flown twice. The environmental agency that ordered the report says this replaces nothing yet.
Sweden's electric timber haulage leaves the pilot stage
Twelve battery trucks have covered 750,000 kilometres over four years at seven sites between Småland and Norrbotten, with range up from 80 to 250 kilometres and charging down from an hour and three quarters to about 40 minutes. Skogforsk, Scania and Stora Enso say the vehicles themselves are no longer the question. The 2030 goal of half of new heavy forestry trucks on battery rests on charging cost, payload and investment risk.
A Finnish thesis prices tree-level laser guidance at one to three percent
Johannes Pohjala at the University of Eastern Finland pulls three studies together on two Ponsse harvesters carrying a scanner that maps the stand around the machine as it works. Marking trees before the operator arrives lifted cutting productivity 2.7 to 2.8 percent; the density assistant added 1.0 to 1.2 across 46 plots and 4,967 felled trees. Operators under 30 rated the assistant 9 out of 10 for usefulness. Those over 30 gave it 3.6.
A backpack scanner measures to the centimetre, but only with the leaves off
Carry the scanner on your back instead of on the machine, and the accuracy holds in one season only. Can Vatandaslar's team walked birch and aspen plots in Tatra National Park with a LiBackpack DGC-50. Leaves off, diameter landed within one to two centimetres and stem volume within 0.03 cubic metres. Leaves on, the volume error doubled on the aspen plot, heights came in up to 1.5 metres short, and the authors call it of limited use at inventory scale.