Integrated forest monitoring system - Smartforest: technological revolution in forest inventories

Abstract

The technology used in forest inventories remains unchanged for decades, despite the huge development in the same period in all areas of science. The current technological evolution supported by the tripod, internet of things, big-data and artificial intelligence, widely diffused in several sectors of the economy and responsible for significant gains in productivity, has not yet reached the forest sector. The proper management of natural, public or private resources of a country depends on the quality of information generated by continuous forest inventory (CFIs). Data collection in the field, as it is currently performed, presents low yield, high cost and low reliability. This impairs the rapid response capacity of companies and governments in the presence of abnormalities such as low growth, mortality and fire. This proposal aims at the full development of the SMARTFOREST solution, a family of IoT sensors integrated with an intelligent web platform with the goal of connecting the forests to the Internet and automating the process of forest monitoring, which has already had its technical feasibility and During Phase 1. It is expected by the end of this project to achieve a commercial availability of the solution. When turning into a more mature solution for forest monitoring, problems regularly faced by professionals working with forest monitoring will be eliminated, given the knowledge of important parameters of the vegetation of a region, such as biomass, carbon content, vegetation healthiness, structural features and the ability to carry out its productive and ecological functions. The results will enable real-time forest monitoring from anywhere in the world, providing forest and natural resource managers with greater responsiveness and decision-making. If contemplated, the project will have a significant impact among researchers and professionals in agribusiness and forest management, both in Brazil and abroad, since the automation of data collection systems, is practically unchanged for more than a century. This innovation will take the techniques of field measurement to the era of Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), worldwide trends in all sectors of the economy. (AU)