PILOT : SHARED MULTIUSER FOREST DATA ENVIRONMENT

The Finnish Forest Centre has an important role to activate the different actors of the forestry sector to utilize Big Data and the third parties to develop new solutions and applications for forest owners and other actors. Currently about 80 percent of private Finnish forestry estates have laser scanned and analysed forest resource data available online. The coverage will be 100 percent by 2020. To make use of this information, the governmental body Finnish Forest Centre (METSAK) provides an eService called Metsään.fi to make this forest resource information available for citizens free of charge. Metsään.fi eService is in constant development by METSAK.

The plan is to pilot presenting crowdsourced forest data and possible new functionalities related to it in Metsään.fi eService and therefore enhance the use of Metsään.fi and METSAK’s forest resource data. The collecting methods are also aimed to increase the amount of METSAK’s forest resource data.

In the DataBio project, Big Data partners will integrate their existing market-ready or almost market-ready technologies to the forest databases with METSAK and the resulted solutions will be piloted with the forestry sector partners, with associated partners and other stakeholders e.g. public policies related to nature conservation, infrastructure or landscape or town plans.

At the moment, there are two recognized areas on crowdsourcing solutions to be piloted: showing quality control data for young stand improvement and early tending for seedling stand, and storm damage data. Other possible crowdsourced data, such as other forest damage than storm damage data, will be evaluated during the project. Another pilotable topic is the open-data interface to environmental and other public data in Metsään.fi databases.

This topic is highly dependable of development of the Finnish forest legislation and piloting it will also be evaluated later during this project. This pilot specifies the equirements for refining and showing the crowdsourced forest data to Metsään.fi users. The implementation of the new functionalities and data-presenting will be carried out in collaboration with Metsään.fi’s development team and other METSAK’s projects. This pilot gives specifications to other projects and follows up the implementation according to these specifications.

The main motivation for this pilot is:

• create requirement specifications for Metsään.fi updates concerning crowdsourced data
• create testing plans for Metsään.fi updates specified in this pilot
• carry out acceptance testing of Metsään.fi update specified in this pilot
• review the requirement and interface specifications of new data collection methods for collecting crowdsourced data
• review forest data standardization updates concerning quality control data
• evaluate other possible crowdsourced data and open data to be piloted

The main KPIs of the pilot are:

• The present amount (in the beginning of 2017) of METSAK’s forest resource data is around 200 GB. The amount is expected to increase by approximately 100 GB per year during this project, amounting to around 500 GB by the end of 2019.

• The coverage of forest resource data in Metsään.fi eService is now around 11 million hectares. The amount is expected to increase by 800 000 hectares per year, amounting to around 13.4 million hectares by the end of 2019.

• The amount of data available to be downloaded for forestry operators’ own information systems is now around 1.5 million hectares. The amount is expected to increase by one million hectares per year, amounting to around 4.5 hectares by the end of 2019.

• The amount of forest owner as Metsään.fi end users is now around 70 000. The amount is expected to increase as follows: 85 000 in the end of 2017, 100 000 in the end of 2018 and 110 000 in the end of 2019.

• The amount of forestry service providers (FSPs) as end user groups is now around 380. The amount is expected to increase as follows: 550 in the end of 217, 650 in the end of 2018 and 750 in the end of 2019. Note: The forestry operator is the actual end user level under the FSPs.