Background

Forests cover 75% of Finland's surface and they play a significant role in the country's economy, in particular for wood export. They also represent a critical source for fire risk during summer, if not correctly maintained. With the increasing impact of climate change, however, the frequency of having a terrain suitable for the passage of heavy harvesting machines is decreasing. This makes forestry maintenance operations very hard to plan and it increases the risk of damaging the soil ecosystem with the use of the heavy machines, especially on peatlands and clay dominated soils.

Optimized forestry operation planning

Harvester Seasons service is created for and with forestry stakeholders, to support better forest operation planning and reduce the risk of production shortfalls.

Harvester Season is created by the Finnish Meteorological Institute and offers of high-resolution maps of trafficability of forestry areas classified based on the type of terrain condition, for the European domain.

Using ensembles to offer long-term forecasts

The service works as follows:

1. The Seasonal weather forecasts from Copernicus Climate Change service, obtained through WEkEO, is bias-corrected with local climate statistics.

2. Together with meteorological weather forecasts those 51 ensembles forecasts are then applied as temperature and precipitation estimates.

3. These are used as input by the Hydrological Operations and Prediction System (HOPS) to predict a range of possible values for soil moisture and ground temperature for the next 6 months.

4. The ensemble forecasts are evaluated with threshold values considered critical for the highly dynamic bearing capacity of relevant soil types. When at least 90% of the runs agree that one or more of these threshold will be reached or not reached, the forecast for good or bad trafficability conditions is provided, respectively