When Space Data makes a difference
How did we help to change how Finnish Forest Act is monitored?
When we started working with Space Data, one of our first major projects was a project by the Government of Finland in cooperation with research institutes and public forest actocrs in Finland. In the project, we developed an automatic nationwide system based on open Sentinel-2 satellite data to help and enhance the Finnish Forest Centre's (Metsäkeskus) forest law Act monitoring. Our role was to develop an automatic method to know when loggings or other changes in forests have happened and enable technology implementation in the future.
As a result of our work, we actually impacted how the Forestry Act monitoring is done by increasing operational and cost-efficiency and by enabling genuine technical and geographical scaling of the satellite technology. Before, forest law monitoring was based on the forest owners' own notifications and random inspections of the forest plots. Today, the monitoring of forest use in Finland is primarily based on information coming from satellites. We have also helped other public and private actors to manage their forest assets better all over the world.
Why share this now? We had a reminder about the European Commission seminar held by NEREUS (Network of European Regions Using Space Technologies) a year back and we thought it is sometimes good to remind ourselves and others that sometimes the thinkgs you do can actually make the difference. The video can be seen below.
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