Free service reveals best ideas in European forestry to professionals – ’We wanted to find solutions’
Bioeconomy and replacing fossil raw materials are at the forefront in a new service Rosewood 4.0 for forest sector professionals, introducing the 260 best practices and ideas in Europe.
The new Rosewood 4.0 web portal brings forestry actors together into a Europe-wide network. The goal is to disseminate the best 260 forestry practices to professionals and decision-makers.
“There’ll be easy-to-find information and ideas for developing operations and activity,” promises Kari Mäkitalo, Senior Scientist at Natural Resources Institute Finland.
The practices were selected from among more than three hundred candidates. The project participants include 15 member states of the EU, plus Switzerland, Ukraine and Norway. Most of the practices presented on the Rosewood website make use of digital technology.
“The aim is to promote European bioeconomy and the diversified and sustainable use of wood, as well as to replace fossil-based raw materials with wood-based ones,” Mäkitalo explains.
The plan is to add new material to the portal in the future. Funded by the European Union, the Rosewood 4.0 (Horizon 2020) project was started two years ago to continue the earlier Rosewood project, which started the collecting of practices. The project also mapped the strengths and weaknesses of forest management in different countries, such as the challenges brought by climate change and the availability of trained employees.
“Our aim now is to find solutions to these challenges,” says Mäkitalo.
As examples of the ideas included in the service, Mäkitalo mentions new technologies in wood construction, transporting seedlings with drones, the automation and digitalization of sawmills and know-how related to training and education in the forest sector.
Finnish website Metsään.fi is included
One of the Finnish items included is Metsään.fi [Into the Forest], a website maintained by the Finnish Forest Centre. Free of charge, it provides forest owners and forest sector actors with information on forest holdings, links to service businesses, help with paperwork and much more.
“Participants from further south in Europe have shown great interest in the Metsään.fi platform. They want to know more about it and maybe develop similar services in their own countries,” Mäkitalo says.
The EU’s objective with the Rosewood 4.0 project is to create a forest sector network that also includes countries where forestry is less important than in Northern Europe. Mäkitalo says that the most input in the project comes from countries with plenty of forests in North and Central Europe.
“Countries in East Central Europe, for example, have not progressed as far in all things, even if they may be ahead of Finland in some things. They will be assisted by countries with more forests,” Mäkitalo says.
“These countries also have areas where forestry is of local importance. We want forestry to gain more visibility than is perhaps afforded by national governments.”
On the Rosewood website, the practices are described in English and partly in the language of the originating country. The Finnish participants in the Rosewood 4.0 project are the Lapland University of Applied Sciences and Natural Resources Institute Finland.