COLLABORATIVE AI FOREST HARVEST PLANNING TOOL FOR BRITISH COLUMBIA

The need for forested land management in Canada

40% of Canada’s land (367M Ha) is forest. Direct and indirect economic acivity from forestry activities accounts for CAD $29.2bn, or 1.7% of the nation’s GDP.

However, this blessing from nature comes with many challenges. Due to lack of economically available timber supply, and operating difficulties in logging of transportation, the profitability of the forestry industry has been decreasing in Canada, resulting in closed mills and lost jobs. In addition, there is a growing concern on the habitability and economic wealth of First Nations’ land, who have limited sovereignty over benefitting from the harvesting of their forested lands. British Columbia is  a province especially touched by these challenges.

NRCanada GeoConnections 2022

There is an urgent need to automate and optimize long-term forest harvesting plans. Skymantics was awarded an NRCan GeoConnections 2022 project to conceptualize a new technology that fosters collaboration between the harvesting industry, forest owners, and First Nations to achieve optimal harvest plans. Leveraged by a GIS interface and Artificial Intelligence / Reinforcement Learning technology, this tool maximizes long-term sustainable revenue considering forest species growth and logistics planning. Skymantics advanced routing engine supports the computation of supply chain and road building costs.

Access the persistent demonstrator

A concept demonstrator is available for testing here.

It allows the user to select forest blocks in British Columbia, select the desired forest inventory and species, configure harvesting parameters, and produce an optimized forestry plan.

Such plan can then be shared collaboratively to achieve transparently the best strategic decisions on resource management and sustainable stewardship. This way, a single source of truth for the land value can support negotiations and agreements between harvesting actors and forest stewards for a more collaborative and sustainable forest management.

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