Browsing by Author "Järvinen, Vesa"

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to find out what kind of views Finnish forest professionals have concerning forest data that’s based on laser scanning. Lately there have been a lot of changes in forest organizations and in the forest professional’s work environment. One of these big changes is that forest data based on laser scanning is becoming a part of operative forest planning. Extensive mapping of forest areas is more often done with airplane or satellite remote sensing. This way it is possible to cut down costs and make mapping more efficient by reducing sample plots and using more remote sensing data. This study focuses on this change from the perspective of an employee of a forest planning or advisory organization. The theoretical frame is action theory. The aim is to find out how this new forest data suits forest planning and is the quality of the data good enough to make forest plans. This research is a very topical subject because forest data that is based on laser scanning is going to bring significant changes to the forest planning field practices. The strengths of laser scanning are that it is objective and it gives at least as accurate tree data measures as other methods. Forest data based on laser scanning is also quite inexpensive, it can be acquired very quickly and it is easy to update. There is very little previous research about this subject. It is likely that new researched information is going to improve the usability of forest data that is based on laser scanning at forest planners’ everyday work. This research was implemented with web-based questionnaire and both quantitative and qualitative methods where used. The sample was taken from three forest organizations (The Finnish Forest Centre, OTSO Forest Services and The Forest Management Associations). The aim was to select forest professionals that use laser scanning based forest information at their work. The whole sample size was 929 respondents and the response rate was 37 percent. The research methods used were statistical description, cross tables and qualitative thematic analysis. When we look at the results it is clear that there are differences on how regularly forest data based on laser scanning is used in these three organizations. The Finnish Forest Centre and OTSO Forest services are using forest data based on laser scanning more often than The Forest Management Associations, but in all of these organizations there was a desire to use it more. The results of this study clearly show that a main part of forest professionals think that this new method is suitable for forest planning at least as an aid to making forest plans. The forest professionals also thought that there is still room for improvement in this new forest data collection method. There are too many errors at reliability especially in young and untreated forest. There is also a difficulty to determine the ratio of tree species. Generally it can be said that forest data based on laser scanning is liked among the forest professionals and they would like to use it more in the future.