Stora Enso precision forestry innovations

As part of the eagerly awaited annual forest technology event, two key presenters from the European forestry giant, Stora Enso Oy will be presenting as part of ForestTECH 2021/22. The company is one of the largest private forest owners in the world with forestry assets valued at more than EUR 7 billion (land and forests). Globally, the company owns or manages land covering a total area of more than 2.0 million hectares.

From Finland, Stora Enso’s VP Plantation Forest Management, Marco Wichert and the company’s Digitalisation Manager, Mika Korvenranta will be presenting as part of the ForestTECH 2021/22 event on some of the innovations that this company has been working on in their forests in Finland and Sweden.

Marco Wichert is a Brazilian Forest Engineer with 24 years of experience in the forestry industry in different parts of the world. He’s worked for most of his career with forestry operations development, testing, and introducing new technologies in the silviculture, harvesting, and logistic operations of forestry companies in Brazil, China, and Indonesia. He has also worked for five years in Forest Management Consulting companies in New Zealand. As the VP Plantation Forest Management, he is based in in Helsinki, Finland, but works providing technical support for the forest plantations of the Group in China, Uruguay, and Brazil.

Marco’s presentation will address the topics of mechanized solutions for silviculture, Precision Forestry and Big Data Management, and will cover;

– Mechanized and automated solutions for seedling packaging and movement from the nursery to the field
– A new planting machine under development in Sweden
– Eco-RFID tags to automate the tracking process of products in the value chain
– Stora Enso’s approach to precision forestry and big data management

Mika Korvenranta, as the Digitalization Manager for Stora Enso’s Forest Division works with Precision Forestry projects and digitisation across the company’s holdings. Mika at ForestTECH 2021 will be detailing how drone and forest inventory innovations are being used in the forests of Finland & Sweden. Examples will include a method the company has developed for safer, accurate and faster measurements of mill yard wood and chip piles using drone-based image analyses (see below).

Other topics Mika will be covering include multisource remote sensing data to improve diameter distribution analysis for improving their harvesting operations. They are using the best features of different data sources to improve forest attributes and diameter distribution estimations with an AI model. In addition to accurate estimations of the forest resource it’s also enabling the company to keep estimations up to date with the multisource data.

Full details on the presenters and programme, can be found on the ForestTECH 2021/22 website