Novel digital solutions and multi-sourced data in assessing trafficability of forest roads – Take me home country road

The majority of Finland's 160,000 km forest road network is at the end of its service life and in need of basic renovation. At the same time, the volumes of timber supply and the total masses of timber trucks have increased. Monitoring, maintaining, and rehabilitating a large and decentralized private road network requires the integration of multiple data sources, intelligent digital solutions and new knowledge.

We will establish precision monitoring sections for the forest roads, and the forest road data stored from the sites will be shared and visualized on the Forest road-hub web portal being developed in the project. In the project, tacit knowledge of the users of forest and gravel roads is collected through interviews concentrating on road owners, road users, road maintenance and rehabilitation entrepreneurs and other road experts. This provides a comprehensive overview of problems, needs and operating models in forest road management and transportation. The project investigates the applicability and accuracy of different data sources and methods in identifying forest road properties and predicting bearing capacity. Supported by the new information, the project will develop a map-based system for predicting the condition of the forest road, which will be demonstrated during the project. At the end of the project, a roadmap-paper for the utilization of forest road data will be drawn up, which will form a further development plan for the developed monitoring and forecasting systems in response to the main question: How to move towards a dynamic prediction of road trafficability and up-to-date road information services.

The implementers of the Take me home, country road project are the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), the University of Eastern Finland and Business Joensuu. The project lasts two years until 2023.