water management; riparian forests; beavers; drainage ditches

The scope of the projects included issues related to:

• operation and maintenance of drainage equipment,
• the beaver's impact on water quality,
• forest management in the vicinity of surface waters,
• modern tools supporting water management in forests.

Among the main practical results of the projects there are: 

- Mobile apps:

• WAMBAF (available on Android and iOS), developed to support the ditch inventorying and ditch management in forests. Application is connected to the GIS system available on: http://www.wambaf.com/?page_id=154&lang=en,
• Blue Targeting (available on Android and iOS), a forestry planning tool which helps you design a riparian forest buffer. The aim is to protect water quality and biodiversity by proposing the right measure, at the right place, to the right extent.

- Wet Area Maps – available for Sweden, Poland, Finland and Latvia, based on airborne laser scanning data. Maps illustrate the occurence of groundwater and may be used in the planning of wood harvesting operations.

- Developing the algorithm for drainage ditches detection basing on airborne laser scanning data. It will be published as open source in 2022.

In the projects several Good Practice Manuals have been developed, regarding: water management in riparian forests, structures for water retention in forests and beaver population management. The manuals are available in several language versions. Main target groups were: forest managers, harvesting machines' operators, land owners, hunters and nature conservation units. The coordinator of the projects was Swedish Forest Agency (Skogsstyrelsen).