Editor's note
This week opens with a new page. The Forestry Tech Landscape is live: more than 100 companies building technology for forests, sorted by what they build, each with the stories this newsletter has reported about them. Some we have not written about yet, and they are marked as such.
This issue shows how spread out the field has become. Drones that thin from the air, harvester data that replaces a field visit, phone apps tested in a national forest inventory: each comes from a different corner of the industry. Anyone choosing traceability software needs a separate site just to compare vendors. The landscape is our attempt to gather all these companies and products in one place.
It is a first version and it will grow every week. If your company is on it and something is wrong, if it should be there and is not, or if you find a bug, reply to this email.
Axel
Finland trials apps and photos in its national forest inventory
The Finnish research institute Luke is using this summer's National Forest Inventory to test tools while it collects data. On 513 plots, teams recorded birds with a birdsong app and photographed polypores and ground vegetation for experts to identify later. Nearly all polypores could be named from the photos, and vegetation photos were faster than estimates on site. The app was reliable in early summer but faltered once birds went quiet. The project runs to 2027 and keeps what proves reliable and cheap enough.
Skogforsk simulates drone thinning without strip roads
Skogforsk has simulated what AirForestry's thinning drones, last covered in #047, would mean for a stand over a full rotation. The drone lifts single trees from above, so a stand can be thinned lightly two or three times with no strip roads, instead of once and heavily by harvester. The simulations gave 9.5 percent more timber, since light thinnings and the absence of strip roads cost less growth. Skogforsk calls the results indicative and wants field trials.
Metsäteho turns strip-road trees into a stand sample
Researchers at Finland's Metsäteho took harvester data from seven first-thinning stands and tested three ways of picking out the trees cut to open strip roads, to use them as a sample of the whole stand. Combining boom angle with boom length found those trees most reliably. On every stand, though, the strip roads ran through sparser, smaller trees than average, so the sample tends to understate the stand. Harvester data can replace the field visit, but uneven stands need a correction.
Canada funds a digital fibre-tracking centre in New Brunswick
Ottawa will put up to C$50 million into a Strategic Innovation Centre in Digital Forestry in New Brunswick, led by the Northern Hardwoods Research Institute with ResearchNB. The centre is a pilot for tracking wood fibre through the supply chain and matching what the forest holds to what each mill needs. With wildfire, pests and US tariffs making supply less certain, the aim is firmer fibre supply and lower costs.
Preferred by Nature opens a free comparison of traceability software
Preferred by Nature has fully launched its Traceability Tools Navigator, a free site for comparing traceability and due-diligence software for timber supply chains. Users filter tools by commodity and function and set them side by side. New since the March beta, vendors' own claims are kept apart from those the organisation says it has checked. For a company picking a system for the EU deforestation rules, that shortens the search, though a verified mark is no compliance guarantee.
New in the landscape
Logscom AB (Timber logistics & traceability). Swedish maker of inkjet timber marking systems for forwarders and harvester heads, plus the MetricBoost service for checking harvester measurements.
Mai Intelligence (Satellite & remote sensing). Gothenburg company monitoring forest health from Sentinel-2 satellite data and building its own CubeSat to spot bark beetle attacks earlier.
Svepreg AB (Timber logistics & traceability). Makes ikorni, a camera and AI system on timber trucks that records the logs on a load as the crane loads them.