The Finnish forest centre (FFC) is a public body that operates under the steering of the ministry of agriculture and forestry, Finland. It gathers data either by purchasing it from the private sector (e.g. airborne-laserscanned data) or by receiving it for performing statutory responsibilities, i.e. data-sharing activities enforced by legislation. Finally, the FFC can also receive data for free from the general public or private-sector players via crowdsourcing solutions.
The majority of forest-data-related services is available on Metsään.fi, a portal through which people who own forest property in Finland can conduct business related to their forests from the comfort of their own homes. The portal connects owners with relevant third parties, including providers of forestry services. This makes it easy to commission management work and to be in touch with forestry professionals. The data(personal and non-personal, such as laser-scanned (point-cloud) data, canopy-height model (CHM), aerial photography, micro-compartment data) is normally anonymised. If it is not, there is a specific registration procedure, based on legislation, to complete to obtain the information.
The FFC is currently building a data platform to support private-sector application and business-solution development purposes. The first use case is related to more cost-efficient timber material management and timber procurement. Another use case is related to the dynamic forest-management planning, which will produce better services for private forest owners. Private-sector players should develop these use cases. In the near future, a cloud-based forest-data platform will be established to support data sharing between the FFC and other data sources, especially for the open forest-data services. The forest-data platform will combine data from multiple public- and open-data sources such as environmental and weather data. The new forest-data platform will enable data fusions and supports GeoJSON queries.
The Finnish open forest-data system was launched in March 2018. Since then, the available amount of open forest data has increased from 0.36 terabytes (TB) (×1012) to 0.38 TB, and the amount of downloaded data has exceeded 10.5 TB. The ultimate goal of the open forest-data system is to provide a basis for developing innovative tools and solutions for forestry and other forest-related activities.