Rosewood 4.0

Established 75 years ago, Solør VGS Sønsterud has since been a national leader in training for forestry operations. The campus is currently part of Solør VGS with around 500 students aged 16-18 years and 135 employees. Teaching takes place both indoors and outdoors and allows pupils a practical approach to forestry. The curriculum follows the yearly season with planning, forest culture and logging. 

Drones are used as a supplement to teaching, where they film objects and stock as a basis for work in teaching. This is to visualize select challenges or to show before/after an activity. When training operation of forestry machines, drones allow students and teachers to see the work from a birds-eye perspective. Used correctly, this may lead to increased learning both for those who observe, but especially for those who are observed and who get to see themselves at work. The time every pupil can spend operating forestry machines is limited, it is therefore important to make good use of the time available. By filming every student operating a forestry machine, the learning outcome will be increased for the students by allowing them to see themselves and get positive and constructive feedback. Drones allow prioritization of areas for improvement.

Established 75 years ago, Solør VGS Sønsterud has since been a national leader in training for forestry operations. The campus is currently part of Solør VGS with around 500 students aged 16-18 years and 135 employees. Teaching takes place both indoors and outdoors and allows pupils a practical approach to forestry. The curriculum follows the yearly season with planning, forest culture and logging.
Drones are used as a supplement to teaching, where they film objects and stock as a basis for work in teaching. This is to visualize select challenges or to show before/after an activity. When training operation of forestry machines, drones allow students and teachers to see the work from a birds-eye perspective. Used correctly, this may lead to increased learning both for those who observe, but especially for those who are observed and who get to see themselves at work. The time every pupil can spend operating forestry machines is limited, it is therefore important to make good use of the time available. By filming every student operating a forestry machine, the learning outcome will be increased for the students by allowing them to see themselves and get positive and constructive feedback. Drones allow prioritization of areas for improvement.

The online School of Forestry has been established in collaboration between the Norwegian Forest owners' associations, the State Forest, and the Forestry Extension Institute. The aim is to jointly develop the course content to increase the level of forestry expertise in all stages of forestry. The courses are open for everyone, although the target group are the organisations' employees. The system allows each organisation to make individual additions and adaptations to the courses. Several courses will be presented on the platform, mainly in the topics of silviculture, planting and soil preparation. The course content may be used by all organisations, with their own individual additions and adaptations.

Skogkurs is intended to be the common body for competence in business development and management of forests and other land resources. Through its activities, Skogkurs will contribute to increasing competence among actors in the forestry industry, and disseminate forest and nature knowledge to schools and the public. Skogkurs has 36 member organizations. “Active forestry” is a nationwide offer with courses aimed at forest owners, forestry workers and forestry operators. The courses are also relevant for other groups that use forestry tools, either professionally or in their spare time. The courses provide practical guidance, have a small group size and skilled authorized instructors. These are short, targeted, locally adapted courses that are given close to home or in the workplace. The teaching program “Teach with the Forest” offers lessons from kindergarten to higher learning educator programs.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Food contributes significantly to the financing of the activities. About half of the development projects where Skogkurs has project management are partly funded through one or more of the forestry's own funds. Adult education funding, funding from the Norwegian Environment Agency and project funding from other partners also make important financial contributions to Skogkurs' activities.

The internet portal provides insights into many aspects of North Rhine-Westphalia's forests via interactive, user-friendly maps. Forest ecology and management, forest nature conservation, recreational use, damage events, hazard prevention and other topics can be selected to search for specific information. How does climate change affect individual forest sites and which climate adaptation measures are suitable to preserve the functions of the forest as far as possible? The service provides comprehensive information on forest types, functions, management, and use, as well as climate change impacts on forest management. Climate adaptation measures are recommended to make forests more adaptable and resilient, including recommendation of appropriate tree species and mixed stands for different soil and climate conditions. As a comprehensive forest information system for the timber and forestry sector, the portal is aimed in particular at private forest owners and forest-owning municipalities and supports a wide range of evaluations and forestry planning. It is part of the climate adaptation strategy for forests in NRW and integrates databases of the state enterprise Wald und Holz NRW, the State Agency for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection and the NRW Geological Survey. Relevant climate variables such as soil atmosphere (air temperature, precipitation); land surface (photosynthetic activity, land cover, biomass, forest fire, soil moisture) are integrated.

FOVEA offers an innovative all-in-one solution for digital logging of wood: With the “iFOVEA Pro” app, wooden piles of any size can be measured in a few minutes using the latest image processing technology. In addition, the forest management system (FMS) supports the inventory and logistics of wood quantities as extensive online software. The iFOVEA app provides different measurement methods depending on the requirements:

• Photo-optical measurement for plywood piles (number, solid cubic meters and cubic meters)
• Photo-optical measurement for industrial wood (outline and cubic meter)
• Photo-optical measurement for trucks (number, solid cubic meters and cubic meters)
• Data acquisition for long timber
• Manual section procedure with and without line sampling

The calculation of all measured values takes place directly on the smartphone or tablet and does not require an internet connection in the forest. With numerous configuration options, each measurement method can be individually adapted. With the Forest Management System (FMS), the measured data can be easily managed online. In addition to an extensive wood inventory, the system offers a map function and options for invoicing and automatic calculation of wood prices.

In the iWald project, a system is being developed enabling forest owners to obtain realistic and technically sound options for the sustainable management of their forests. The individual objectives of the forest owner (private, communal, state) are taken into account as well as the forestry risk minimization and the sustainable conversion of forests while safeguarding the economic, ecological and social forest functions. One of the main results of iWald will be the "iWald App", which can be used to simulate forest growth processes on a smartphone. This will be provided with different entry barriers, so that both the forest layman and the trained forester will find their access to iWald. The goals include activating forest owners, who can thus approach their forest on a playful level, or improving public acceptance of forestry interventions through the possibility of simple visualization of future consequences.

Scanner is under constant development. A measuring device, mounted at the towing hitch of a car. Sensors collect values, to assess the road quality of unpaved, single lane roads. The system consists of ultrasonic sensors to scan the cross section of a road segment, acceleration sensors to get information about the longitudinal roughness and a GPS sensor for locating the information. After data collection, an open configurable software bundle (implemented as GUI modules in iFOS) allows individual settings for the single sensor thresholds and algorithms to adopt the system to the own road maintenance concept. Mounted at the car of the forest ranger an easy and frequent data collection is possible and provides an early and objective knowledge about the constructional decline of road segments. Maintenance costs can  be reduced and reconstruction measures get execute mor accurate.  A logical data interpretation of the sensor values is possible. The assignment of the sensors towards different decay expressions on the road surface was conducted and semi- automatically related to road quality segment classification. Results show, that a single manual optical assessment of road segments miss first phases of road decay and underlines the potential of such systems. Tests and calibrations of the road-scanner allows a good data interpretation for the set task. Many degrees of freedom of the scanner and the data interpretation still leaves some open research questions.