Customer References & Tenders

Challenge

Metsähallitus Forestry Ltd manages 5 million hectares of Finland’s state-owned multiple-use forests, balancing economic timber production with ecological, social, and recreational values.

Because state-owned forests are essential for recreation, biodiversity, and climate change mitigation, there is big public interest on how the forests are being managed.

To support sustainable operations, the organization needed better tools to assess environmental risks and identify where surface water drainage maintenance was most urgently needed.

Solution

The project delivered advanced, spatially driven datasets to guide environmentally responsible ditch‑maintenance planning. The ditch-depth information also contributed to the national peatland carbon‑balance calculations by the Natural Resources Institute of Finland, supporting broader climate analyses on emissions and sequestration.

Considering each contributing factor one at a time is time consuming and susceptible to human errors, so Arbonaut produced a suite of analytical products designed to make ditch maintenance planning more effieicnt, accurate, transparent, and ecologically safe:

• Five-level environmental risk assessment system for quick visual evaluation of ditch maintenance risks
• Detailed feature attributes, showing which environmental or cultural elements caused elevated risk
• Ditch depth analysis using digitized ditch lines and national LiDAR data
• Depth datasets prepared for further integration into Metsähallitus’ spatial planning workflows

Outcomes

The project provided Metsähallitus Forestry with actionable, high-resolution datasets that strengthen decision‐making, reduced environmental risks, and supported national climate and carbon-balance assessments.

The resulting tools streamlined planning processes and reinforced Finland’s strong standards for sustainable forest management.