Spatial forest biomass supply chain analysis in Finland

Abstract

The forest biomass supply represents an important part of the value chain for different woodbased products, and its environmental impacts are also frequently crucial. The performance of biomass supply chains (BSCs) can be assessed for various purposes and using a variety of methodological approaches, either including or excluding spatial properties. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate what kind of spatial data are required and available for casespecific BSC analyses in Finland, and what would be suitable levels of spatial precision for the various approaches. This thesis consists of five papers, one of which reviews case studies carried out in various geographical BSC environments around the world, while the remaining four are spatial case studies of BSC systems in Finland, three of them focusing on bioenergy production and one assessing the performance of a novel pulpwood transportation concept. A geographical information system (GIS) was used as the principal tool in one study, while in the other three the role of GIS was to produce spatially analysed data for life-cycle assessment and agent-based simulation. The main conclusion is that a spatial precision of between 1 km and 10 km, where each point of origin represents roughly an area of 1-100 km 2 , is sufficient for forest biomass data in Finnish BSC systems. The final precision should be determined collectively by the setup of the case study, factors leading to complexity in the supply chain system and the geographical extent of the area concerned. Relative to many other parts of the world, Finland has a readily available high quality source of spatial data for BSC research. It is recommended that GIS-based research could be improved by adding dynamic properties and stochasticity to the models, because temporal variations in feedstock supply and demand will probably increase in the future.

Forest Supply Chains during Digitalization: Current Implementations and Prospects in Near Future

“…In wood harvesting operation, the abstraction presented here would obviously necessitate the inclusion of wood forwarding tracks in the transport network of forest stands, and data of this kind are not yet publicly available. Instead, it is convenient to use roadside storage locations as the starting points for WSCs, or, if the locations are unknown, to choose a spatial precision that corresponds sufficiently well to the distributions of roadside storage sites in the real world [24 Both, vector and raster data can be used to model the transportation network in GIS, since transport distances, times and costs can also be assessed using raster data and raster calculation tools, but it can be difficult to account for dense network areas, if a too small scale (i.e., a coarse grid) is used [58]. Also, the modelling of complex road objects will obviously be more straightforward in a vector-based system than in a set of raster layers.…”