Finland Use Case

In Brief: We will assess how well the Forest DTC system meets the monitoring needs of the Core User, Finnish Forest Centre. We will evaluate the system’s potential to monitor and predict the long-term ecological value of forests, especially old-growth areas, and explore how individual tree detection data can be integrated into Forest DTC.
Core User: The Finnish Forest Centre.
Forest type: Boreal.
Study area: Southeast Finland.
Special focus: Development of forest resources and carbon balance under different management scenarios; Monitoring of old-growth forest; Application of single tree inventory as input data.

Background

A forest management component simulates forest management operations and allows the user to define different management scenarios.
Practices and guidelines vary by country or region and are often regulated by national legislation.
Simulations typically use specialised software with local management and forest development models.
Forest owners’ objectives influence management, and optimisation modules generate programmes aligned with rules, forest development and owner goals.

Implementation in Forest DTC

Forest DTC implements a separate forest management module that can be used to simulate the effect of different regional forest harvesting scenarios (harvesting levels) with a simplified set of management rules.
In the Finland Use Case, the rules are derived from Best Practices for Sustainable Forest Management in Finland (read more here).
The module is independent of growth models and does not include optimisation.
This approach enables the use of Forest DTC for forest management scenarios in different countries or regions either by adding region-specific simplified rules to the module or, if more complex scenarios or optimisation are required, by replacing the module with dedicated forest simulation and optimisation software.