Single item identification for forest production, protection and management

PROJECT NUMBER: 101082051
PROJECT CODE: SINTETIC
PROJECT TITLE: Single item identification for forest production, protection and management
PROJECT LEADER: Assoc. Prof. Jakub Sandak, PhD
PERIOD: 01.05.2023 – 30.04.2027
BUDGET: EUR 8,853,625.00 (EUR 422,500.00 for InnoRenew CoE)
FINANCING: Horizon Europe
PROJECT COORDINATOR: CONSORCI CENTRE DE CIENCIA I TECNOLOGIA FORESTAL DE CATALUNYA (Spain)
PARTNERS: MiCROTEC S.R.L. (Italy); BLUEBILOBA STARTUP INNOVATIVA S.R.L. (Italy); OTMETKA (Sweden); Simtrona d.o.o. (Slovenia); UNIVERSITATEA TRANSILVANIA DIN BRASOV (Romania); CEETTAR (Belgium); INNORENEW COE (Slovenia); ASSOCIAZIONE FORESTA MODELLO DELLE MONTAGNE FIORENTINE (Italy); TREEMETRICS LIMITED (Ireland); PiveteauBois (France); CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE (Italy); Arboreal AB (Sweden); Boscat Fusta, S.L. (Spain); LABORATORIO DI MONITORAGGIO E MODELLISTICA AMBIENTALE PER LO SVILUPPO SOSTENIBILE – LAMMA (Italy); ITA-SUOMEN YLIOPISTO (Finland); Fiskarhedens Trävaru AB (Sweden); SC Silvador Company SRL (Romania)

The core objective of SINTETIC is to set up and demonstrate a traceability system for trees, logs and boards based on state-of-the-art ICT through a central Geodatabase covering the whole forest-based value chain. The proposed solution mitigates three main technological drawbacks of today’s forestry sector. Firstly, advanced ICT is deployed only in areas with mature timber markets, such as North/Central EU. Secondly, these technologies cannot be used during the whole value chain, causing several losses of resources and information. Finally, a reliable tool for tracing the origin of forest products is missing, therefore allowing illegal practices and not sustainable use of natural resources. The SINTETIC project will pursuit to achieve a higher value recovery of timber assortments by increase the overall efficiency of the timber supply chain. It will result in a greater competitive advantage of the EU forest industry. Implementation of the proposed ICT solutions will result in increase of the EU forested area under active management through aggregation of 12.000 ha fragmented properties, only in the zones of the project demonstration. In addition, results from the project will contribute to increase the timber value, as well as of the resilience and the ecosystem services. A single and universal ICT solution will facilitate a homogeneous and widespread uptake of the developed tools in the forest sector at different development levels. The main innovations will include, among the others, traceability system combined with efficient assortment’s marking and quality assessment. Series of smartphone APPs for assisting motor-manual harvesting operations and forest ownership aggregation platform will be developed. Moreover, several hardware prototypes, such as intelligent processor head, LiDAR system integrated with harvester, diverse sawmill sensors incorporated with traceability of sawnwood will be developed, tested and demonstrated. To make all this possible, SINTETIC will develop an original Geodatabase with a set of data providers interconnected by the traceability system. It will include Earth observation capabilities resulting in development of illegal logging alert service. The Geodatabase will provide a solution for multi-platform data acquisition along the whole supply chain. In addition, data transmission with secured digital tools and physical IDs on timber products as well as data storage infrastructure will be deployed. The broad range of well-structured data will allow through analysis and generation of the unique further services.

InnoRenew CoE project activities

InnoRenew CoE will lead the WP2, take care of coordination of hardware development and integration of systems, validation of the system and demonstration of the system in use.