Metsään.fi provides eServices for forest owners and forestry service providers. The online application shows the maps, forest information and, silvicultural and cutting possibilities of each forest estate and their compartments:
- Soil and forest site type
- Growing stock
- Treatment proposals for a five-year period
- Natural values (habitats of special importance)
- Latest maps and aerial photographs with compartment borders
- Annual growth.
Metsään.fi also allows forest owners to apply for subsidies for improvement of young stands and declare notifications of forest use (e.eg. cuttings) by filling e-forms instead of paper ones. In addition, forest owners can contact forest service producers via the system. Metsään.fi is quite easy to use and it provides the forest owner many new flexible services, e.g. e-forms for applying subsidies. It’s a safe system, although being a public one. A strong identification of the user is needed, use of Suomi.fi e-Identification is safe and provided by the state. Suomi.fi e-Identification contains a list of the identification tokens for example using online banking codes, mobile certificate or certificate cards
The Finnish Forest Centre collects and maintains remote sensing based data of forest resources covering the private forests. Metsään.fi is a free portal using that forest data for serving forest owners and forestry service providers. It has been found to encourage forest owners to carry out silvicultural works and generally for developing forest businesses.
Metsään.fi in numbers in early 2020: 13,5 million hectares of forest data in the service, 108 765 forest owners have visited the service, 942 service providers have joined the service, 2461 operators use the service, 8,4 million hectares available to operators, 537 706 consents available to operators.