Dianthus, together with Södra Skogsägarna, has introduced a new gear to lift Dianthus’ service for fully automatic stand delineation and forest parameter estimation to meet modern forestry’s requirements for reliability, resolution and cost-effectiveness.
“The biggest news is that we are creating a genuine service that Södra Skogsägarna’s systems can call,” says Fredrik Walter, CEO and Dianthus’ Data Scientist. Södra’s systems send in a property area and back they get a complete forest stand delineation with forest descriptions for each stand, a perfect basis for a forest management plan.
The high-resolution datasets of recent years, thanks to the national laser scanning and its freely available forest variables, have created completely different opportunities for daring to think new and different about traditional forest appreciation.
Dianthus has for a long time developed and marketed services for automatic forest division and estimation. The methodology is based on combining different data sources to create an automatic stand delineation with associated forest data in a structured and logical way. Dianthus and Södra have now further improved the service and expanded with functionality to easily deliver the result directly into Södra’s GIS system.
– It is also very easy to update the description e.g. after the action has been performed. In with the action and back comes an updated description, says Fredrik.
Over the past year, Dianthus has further developed its methodology and the algorithms have been extensively evaluated together with Södra. This has been done through an iterative test process where Södra contributed with input and followed up the results from the service in the field.
“We are very pleased with the results of the tests and see the service as one of the cornerstones of Södra’s investment in developing the next generation of decision-making data for forest owners. This is something we know our members are asking for and our hope is that it will help them make the decision that suits them and their forest best. The service provides us with constantly up-to-date forest information and with Dianthus’ new AI model, we have received a quality boost regarding the automatic stand delineation, says Viktor Silvemark, business developer at Södra skog.
The service will be completed after the summer of 2022 and is a first step in Dianthus’ strategic investment in building up GIS- and remote sensing-based services for Swedish forestry to “build into” its forest systems.
“There is a great interest in the service and it is gratifying that we see that it adds benefit to a broad segment of customers in forestry,” says Johan Bergström, project manager at Dianthus. What unites is, of course, the desire to get the basic need for forest descriptions satisfied with a robust, high-resolution and extremely cost-effective service so that you instead spend resources on what gives a completely different added value.
Facts about Södra skogsägarna:
Södra is Sweden’s largest forest owners’ association with 52,000 forest owners as members. The members together own more than half of the privately owned forest in southern Sweden. They are also the owners of a forest products group with customers all over the world.
They refine the sustainable forest raw material from the members’ responsibly managed forests to renewable, climate-smart products and solutions that create value for many people.
