TECH4EFFFECT Italian consortium partners, the national alliance of forest companies, CONAIBO, and the national research council, CNR IBE, attended the world’s leading biomass heating industry event, Progetto Fuoco, in Verona, Italy in February to present the TECH4EFFECT project and SILVISMART Efficiency Portal by focusing on efficient wood procurement.

TECH4EFFECT promotes and creates methods, tools, business models and digital solutions to encourage increased wood production and environmental efficiency for many uses within the wood value chain, including biomass heating.

National Assembly opens event

President of CONAIBO, Livio Bozzolo, opened the National Assembly of Italian forest enterprises at the Progetto Fuoco event which met for the purposes of information sharing and discussion. Lawyer Alessandro Franco addressed the critical issues of safety within the forestry sector, while the new European Union Timber Regulation was presented by the Technical Director of CIFORT-CONAIBO, Luca Canzan. Major of the Carabineri and Commander of CITES team of Vicenza, Luca Stella, gave other specific Italian normative updates involving the sector.

T4E Partner at Progetto Fuoco 2020

The TECH4EFFECT workshop, which was the second part of the meeting, was held after the assembly. CNR IBE participant, Dr Natascia Magagnotti, gave a general presentation on the TECH4EFFECT project highlighting the main results achieved to date, while CONAIBO representative for TECH4EFFECT, Dr Giulio Cosola, presented the SILVISMART Efficiency Portal under the title “Techniques and technologies for an efficient wood procurement”.

SILVISMART

SILVISMART, a major deliverable of TECH4EFFECT, has developed a forestry data efficiency portal based on the collection of real-time data from forestry operations for business intelligence and decision support.

Collected data is systemised and transformed into valuable information, which is secure, and presented in pictorial graphs aiming to transfer better knowledge and control over a harvesting operation. The data collector has full control on what data is shared, taking care of any GDPR issues. 

Participation interest shown

The workshop was well attended by many forest enterprises using mechanized harvesters which potentially makes it is easier to provide data transferred from the onboard computers in harvester cabs.

Cosola said that Italy typically had a combination of both mechanized harvesters and motor manual means, even for technologically advanced and modern enterprises.

“This is due to its mountainous terrain and naturalistic forest contexts where felling operations are carried out by chainsaws and tractors, which are still an important part of the wood logging process in the country,” he explained.

He emphasized that new enterprises with modern harvester forwarder machines showed a keen interest in joining the project when the TECH4EFFECT Mapping App became active. 

“Data would then be able to be sent to the portal account of the operator in a way that would be possible to sync data by location (object) and operator/machine, as well,” he said.

The event which gathered relevant parties was deemed a success in that it allowed for constructive discussion and exchange which was specifically relevant to the TECH4EFFECT project.