Editor's note
Two measuring points moved closer to the stump. Svepreg wants the load counted while the crane is still filling it, instead of at the mill gate. Södra now lets four numbers in a member's plan refresh from orbit, instead of waiting for someone to walk the stand.
Look at which parts moved. Volume, basal area, height, diameter: dimensions a sensor can reach. Species mix, site index, stand boundaries, the line about a conservation value: still a person, still a visit. The cheap half of the job goes first, and what stays behind is not leftovers. It is judgement, which is what a field visit was for in the first place.
Axel
Sveaskog tests a crane that records what it is lifting
Roundwood is normally counted when it reaches the mill. Svepreg's ikorni reads each grab as the timber goes on, and by the company's account assembles a record of the full load without anyone stopping to measure it. The Ludvika firm says it went in at the end of August, on a single vehicle, with Biometria's head of measurement development following the trial. No accuracy figures have been published. Dala-Demokraten reports a 7 million kronor raise the same week.
Terra Labs remote sensing now feeds Södra's app
Min skogsgård 3 is open to every member of the cooperative, the place to read a forest management plan and follow the deals running against it. Volume, basal area, height and diameter now refresh on their own inside it, under a partnership first named in June 2025. Species mix, site index, stand boundaries, conservation comments and certification requirements still change only when someone goes out and changes them.
A satellite forest model crosses a border without starting over
Free pictures from orbit, expensive numbers on the ground. NIBIO, VTT and Gamma Remote Sensing went at that gap: they taught neural networks to read standing volume and mean height off Sentinel imagery, using Norway's national laser map as the answer key. Checked on ground they had never seen, the networks accounted for 59 percent of the difference in volume between stands, and 70 percent in height. Retuned on a batch of Finnish ground measurements, they worked in Finland too, so the next country does not start from scratch.
A windthrow model stumbles the moment it leaves home
Compare airborne scans of the same forest before and after a storm and you can see which stands went down: 29,244 New Zealand pine stands, half flattened, half still standing. The question was not whether that can be learned, but whether it travels. Scored where it was trained, the classifier picked the flattened stands correctly about nine times in ten. Moved to a region it had never seen, that fell to as low as six and a half. Stand structure did most of the work; long-run climate added the rest.
ForestrySA switches on a fire camera above the Adelaide Hills
The eight already up on the Limestone Coast watch commercial plantation. This one, on a tower at Mount Crawford, covers country where stands run into housing, the first time the state has put one there. Pano AI's kit feeds ultra-high-definition panoramic views into automatic detection, satellite data and a human check before an alert goes out. The existing network caught close to 90 unplanned blazes over three seasons, by the operators' count. The agency bought one.