National

In the iWald project, a system is being developed enabling forest owners to obtain realistic and technically sound options for the sustainable management of their forests. The individual objectives of the forest owner (private, communal, state) are taken into account as well as the forestry risk minimization and the sustainable conversion of forests while safeguarding the economic, ecological and social forest functions. One of the main results of iWald will be the "iWald App", which can be used to simulate forest growth processes on a smartphone. This will be provided with different entry barriers, so that both the forest layman and the trained forester will find their access to iWald. The goals include activating forest owners, who can thus approach their forest on a playful level, or improving public acceptance of forestry interventions through the possibility of simple visualization of future consequences.

HeProMo is an IT-based tool to predict the costs of timber harvesting scenarios under different aspects such as harvester logging. It allows certain settings to reflect the real situations in the forest. It provides preliminary costing and sensitivity analysis. estimation of productivity and cost for wood harvesting operations (preliminary costing). Writing and controlling offers for wood harvesting operations. Estimation of variables and their importance (sensitivity analysis). Well suitable for application in teaching , eductaion and research to identify key contributing factors and assessmen of their influence on the results. The productivity model (HeProMO) predicts quickly and with a good accurancy the costs for concrete timber harvestin scenarios. It allows the identification of optimization possibilities. The application is quite easy to handle and gives a solid basis for good economic choices.

Improved work safety through a sensor node network which connects to anyone carrying such a node and provides information about the current danger situation over a license-free band using Bluetooth low energy (BLE). For example: in a tree felling operation with a harvester which is supported by a forest worker, any person with such a little IT-device in his / her pocket (such as supervision personal, field forester, …) will get information about the position of the harvester and the work the harvester is doing. On the other hand, also the harvester has the information about these people. Risk alert warnings are sent to actors automatically, risk zones and risk status can be retrieved from actors, offenses of critical overlaps in risk safety zones are identified. The system is using u-Blox M8N GPS modules and map visualization on screens. The information gets translated to a danger situation depending on the individual work-situation (for example larger danger area when the harvester is cutting a tree than while driving). Communication of 150 - 700m, up to 9 slave nodes and battery allows 50h usage. GPS accuracy around 2.5m under forest conditions. The system may connect to a Cloud. This opens further data processing options, such as inclusion of passers-by via GSM-net or team-oriented data analysis for work-safety education needs. 

The qualification course delivers a Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS). It is a part-time professional training course designed for company managers and engineers to build up management competences regarding newest economic and engineering procedures and leadership activity competences regarding forestry operations and forestry administration. It amounts to 360 hours or 12 ECTS. Good feedback from former participants about usability of the professional education training.