VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has joined an international consortium on the sustainable use of natural resources. The work covers agriculture, forestry and fishery. The main idea is to apply Big Data to raw material production for the bioeconomy. That sector turns these materials into food, energy and biomaterials. In forestry, MHG Systems leads the pilots that build services on forest data.
The effort is called the Data-Driven Bioeconomy project, or DataBio for short. It is co-funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program. Data pours in from sensors in the soil and air, as well as from aerial and satellite images. The project processes it so that farmers, foresters and fishermen can make better decisions.
Across 26 pilots, partners are building shared software tools to analyze and refine these data flows. The results should also open new business opportunities, since they will spread Big Data into primary production.
Finnish forests
Remote monitoring can raise farm and forest productivity without harming resources. The pilots led by Finnish partners use remote sensing to improve forest management. That management is already advanced in Finland, thanks to The Forest Centre’s Metsään.fi e-service and other online tools. VTT handles the technical coordination of the whole project.
Caj Södergård is a Research Professor at VTT. He said the Finnish pilots are creating tools and operating models based on remote sensing and data sharing. With them, forest owners and others can grow more wood and earn more from it sustainably. Many countries still rely on static plans drawn up at planting. Because those plans offer no way to track how they are carried out, he called the pilots a step forward.
Satellite images help spot forest damage, and then they help plan felling. Airborne laser scanning can map growing trees in even finer detail. With these methods, tree species, volumes and health can be identified automatically. This means owners can plan their work better.
Seppo Huurinainen of MHG Systems coordinates the forestry pilots in four countries. He said they deal with forest data management, data sharing and crowdsourcing. In addition, they build inventory and forest health services for owners, other operators and authorities.
Fields and fleets
In precision farming, most field data comes from local weather stations and soil sensors that watch crops as they grow. Based on these readings, sowing, fertilizing and other machine work can even be run remotely. Satellite images, surveying data and maps are widely used as well.
The fishery pilots do not aim to catch more fish. Instead, they try to cut fishing costs. One pilot covers tropical tuna fisheries outside Spain. Another looks at small pelagic fisheries in the North Atlantic. Both work on energy efficiency and preventive maintenance for fishing vessels.
DataBio brings together 48 partners from 17 countries. The three-year project has a total budget of EUR 16.2 million. Besides Finland, members come from Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, Norway, Poland and Italy. Greece, Israel, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Estonia, France and Romania also take part. Intrasoft runs the administrative coordination, and the project ends in 2019.
Meanwhile, VTT is the leading research and technology company in the Nordic countries. It serves private and public clients at home and abroad. Each year it puts 4,000,000 hours of brainpower into new technology.