How to support the European bioeconomy with Big Data technologies
The importance of a well-functioning bioeconomy is increasingly recognised in addressing challenges like climate change, natural resource scarcity and unsustainable consumption patterns. Defined as an economy in which food, materials and energy are derived from renewable biological resources involving the land and the sea, bioeconomy is seen as a central component of sustainable development. To support its growth, the EU-funded DataBio project has been focusing on the production of raw materials from agriculture, forestry and fishery through 26 pilot trials executed by 48 partners from 17 countries and involving over 100 organisations. As part of these initiatives, the Finnish partners have developed, among others, a mobile application that uses Big Data for forest management. Seppo Huurinainen from MHG Systems Oy Ltd, who coordinates DataBio project’s forestry pilots, explains in a news release: “One of the Finnish consortium’s innovations is a globally unique concept based on forestry standards, which allows landowners and forestry operators to collect data on their forests using a smartphone and upload the data to the Finnish Forest Centre’s forest resource database with the help of an application called Wuudis.” Huurinainen says the application “facilitates the payment of sustainable forestry subsidies and makes it easier to collect information and keep forest inventories up to date.” Monitoring app The same news release by project partner VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd adds: “The Wuudis service and the associated mobile application as well as standardized forest resource data concept provided by the Finnish Forest Centre can be easily scaled to other countries.” The application can also be used to monitor the effects of storms, snow, pests and diseases, according the news item. It also notes that another Finnish pilot has developed a service concept based on inventorying forests using drones. It emphasises that thousands of hectares of forest have already been inventoried with the help of this service. The ongoing DataBio (Data-Driven Bioeconomy) project was set up “to show the benefits of Big Data technologies in the raw material production from agriculture, forestry and fishery/aquaculture for the bioeconomy industry to produce food, energy and biomaterials responsibly and sustainably,” as summarised on the project website. The project “proposes to deploy a state of the art, big data platform on top of the existing partners’ infrastructure and solutions – the Big DATABIO Platform.” In addition to Big Data, the platform utilises Earth observation technologies and ICT. As part of its overall methodology, DataBio collaborates with end users and will “proceed to verify the concept through several pilotings in the chosen sectors.” Pilots under the DataBio project cover precision agriculture that involves olives, fruits, grapes and vegetables, as well as cereals, biomass and fibre crops. Forestry pilots include areas such as forest damage remote sensing, invasive alien species control and monitoring, and a web-mapping service for government decision-making. Fishery pilots focus on oceanic and pelagic fisheries predictions and planning. For more information, please see: DataBio project website
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