Mistra Digital Forest Annual Report 2021 1
PROGRAMME CONFERENCES 2021 May – Boundless digita
lisation in forestry Digitalisation has no boundaries, which is why international cooperation has an important place in Mistra Digital Forest. So, at the programme conference on 20 May 2021, the focus was on cross-border cooperation, and four research programmes outside Sweden were invited to present and discuss digitalisation in forestry. SmartForest, with Rasmus Astrup at Nibio as programme manager, is a large research programme funded by the Research Council of Norway, among others. Finland's equivalent is called UNITE – a programme led by Juha Hyppä, among other things working with gamification – a way of working where game design or the principles for games are applied in areas where games have not traditionally been used. And in Canada – the third most forested country in the world – Forestry4.0 is working with similar issues, amongst others with Glen Légère at the helm. All of them are key international partners for Mistra Digital Forest and participated in the Mistra Digital Forest digital programme conference in the spring of 2021 with around 280 registered participants. Laser scanning down to tree level, predictability in the raw material and increased automation were some examples of aspects that were mentioned by the participants when they were asked what they see existing in the forest in ten years time. Everyone saw several exciting opportunities regarding what the programmes can develop together. Work on standards, AI, deep learning and machine learning came up as proposals for potential areas of collaboration. The possibility of sharing open data was also mentioned by several participants. At present, the programmes work with their own datasets, for example calculations on individual trees and trunks. Everyone agreed that sharing open data between the programmes could benefit both academia and industry. And in addition that it would be interesting to include third-party actors, such as machine suppliers, in future dialogues. During the autumn of 2021, Mistra Digital Forest developed a dialogue with SmartForest on in-depth collaboration. Future meetings with both UNITE and Forestry4.0 are also planned. November – Digitalisation for 2022 sustainable development in forestry How digitalisation contributes to sustainable development was the theme for this autumn's programme conference on 26 November in Mistra Digital Forest – this was also digital. Magnus Thor, head of research at Skogforsk, started the day by talking about sustainable development in forestry. Afterwards, Maja Brisvall, CEO and co-founder of Quantified Planet, gave an inspiring lecture on the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation in society. Examples of how different parts of the programme link to sustainable development followed, and there was a panel discussion with Magnus Thor, Maja Brisvall and Jonny Holmström at SCDI to conclude. In 2022, the programme conferences will take place on 18 May and 23 November. OTHER EVENTS 2021 The programme has been presented at: • Presentation by Sverker Danielsson and Charlotte Bengtsson at the Forum for Bioeconomy, 20 April • Presentation at Hackathon “Forest Hack”, Bioboard platform and Paper Province, 14 April • Presentation at Smart Forest seminar, Nibio, Norway, 9 June • Presentation at the Finnish Forest Policy Forum, organised by Tapio, 28 September • Station on the Forest Technical Cluster's excursion with Sverker Danielsson and Erik Willén, 6 October • Presentation at Koli Forum, Finland, 13 October Results from the work package Forest Facts have been presented at: • Autumn excursion 2021, Föreningen Skogen, online, 16 November • Forest Planning Conference, RIU, online, 10–11 November • International conference on remote sensing of forests, SilviLaser 2021, Vienna, Austria, 28–30 September • Dragon-5 seminar for collaboration on forest research between SLU and Beijing Forestry University, online, 17 June • Participation in the podcast "Skogsdoktorn" (https://www.slu.se/forskarskolor-slu/research-school/podcastskogsdoktorn/avsnitt-2-planering/) • Collaboration Group Planning, online, 4 May • The Forest Research Days, online, 12–16 April • User group Timber Value, Gävle, 5–6 September • Collaboration Group Planning, Uppsala, 9 September • Technician meeting John Deere, Märsta, 8 December • The International Boreal Forest Research Association (IBFRA) conference, online, 17 August Results from the work package Efficient Forestry have been presented at: • The Forest Research Days, 12–16 April • Conference Virtual Breakfast, FORAC, 20 April, “Research and demonstrations of automation in forest operations in Sweden” • FQCF Congress (The Quebec Federation of Forestry Cooperatives) 2021, 8 April • International Forest Engineering Conference: The Council on Forest Engineering (COFE) / International Symposium on Forest Mechanisation (FORMEC) 2021 • IEEE / RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021), pp. 2121-2126, September 27 – October 1, Prague • Forestry Technical Cluster excursion, 6 October • RIU - Forest Planning Conference, 11–12 November Results from the work package The Value of the Forest and Forest Products have been presented at: • PEF seminar on biodiversity and LANCA, 24 November, Swedish Lifecycle Center 23