Potentials and challenges: new technologies for forest inventory

Taking into account many advanced features, such as flexible customization, integration with modern measuring equipment, Field-Map hard and software is a promising system for high quality inventory data gathering and processing. Field-Map is successfully used for forest management planning and National Forest Inventories (NFI) in some European countries, e.g. Czech, Slovakia, Hungary, Belgium, Ireland, Iceland, Denmark. Also during the first attempts to implement a NFI in Ukraine during 2008-2015 Field-Map was used for data gathering and processing.

In light of this SFI-Project supported Ukraine, namely State Forest Management Planning Association (SFMPA), with the procurement of five sets of mayor system elements of FM hard and software, in order to increase data quality and improve efficiency of data processing.

22.08.2023 Bernd Wippel, unique land use GmbH, Head of Forestry Department and Volker Sasse, SFI-Project leader, took part in a NFI data gathering session. In 2023 SFI-project supports the data gathering by SFMPA from 650 field plots. Andrai Shamrai, Head of the Ukrainian Center of National Forest Inventory (CNFI) introduced German experts into the course of data gathering work. It was a raining day and – although field staff worked ambitiously along the standard procedures – some difficulties appeared in using FM under such unpleasant weather conditions.

“In general the system was designed as an advanced inventory tool. When new digital tools and features for mobile devices are pushing on the market for special forest inventory purposes, the Field-Map still follows approach to allow the flexible software adjustment to multiple tasks. So Field-Map implementation requires complex preparatory steps, particularly in-depth training of staff for data gathering, settled client-server data administration and also adjustments of former data into a common database. “SFI-Project will further support Ukraine in establishing an efficient and sustainable forest inventory system“, said Vitaliy Storozhuk, SFI National Project Coordinator.