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Seppo Huurinainen | CEO & Founder | Wuudis Solutions Oy

Wuudis: Easy-to-use IT Solutions for Forestry

In this ever-changing world, it can get hard to keep track of all the problems that the world is facing. The recent pandemic has reminded us of the fragile balance between humans and environment, that is needed to be maintained for life to keep thriving. It is high time to re-think about our societal problems to adapt in a better way for future generations.

Climate change and biodiversity loss is a major concern. Too much neglect and the balance may be lost. But not to worry, we have a much-needed solution – Sustainable Forest management and monitoring. This is a complex challenge requiring high performance monitoring capabilities based on modern technologies. But in the current state of the art, static information and lack of updated forest resource data has been a major problem. Moreover, visit to remote sites are expensive and time consuming to verify the actual conditions of our forests.

But humans are crafty beings, with the vision to find solutions to such problems and the will to act on it. Wuudis Solutions Oy, an IT company based in Finland, is the most advanced dynamic forest and related natural resources and management service. It allows frequent, reliable, and harmonised update of diversified forest data and satellite data (Sentinel, very high-resolution data-VHR etc.).

The software platform performs satellite image interpretation and monitoring activities using artificial intelligence (AI), on free Sentinel and other satellite data, as well as available open data.

The company aims to build platform services for comprehensive forest and related natural resource management and monitoring.

Happy clients

The software interfaces of Wuudis facilitate the day-to-day business for forestry operations and forest resource monitoring, helping forest sector stakeholders to increase their income while reducing operational costs.

Wuudis platform services can produce cost savings of 20% by just converting paper-based forest, biomass, and plantation management plans into digital form, which can be accessed on smartphones.

Additionally, the up-to-date forest resource information based on satellite and field data, available on Wuudis platform drives profitability of forest and biomass industries and companies.

Through their work with present clients, Wuudis has proved itself through improved efficiency of daily routines by 20-40%, increases in revenue by 10-15% and reduce enormous amount of CO2 emissions through more efficient mobilization of biomass.

The platform consists of app/web-service integrated with satellite and open data with ML techniques to increase the profitability and positive environment impact of the forest and related natural resource sector.

Laatumetsä

Wuudis Solutions developed the Laatumetsä (Forest work quality monitoring in English) app for Finnish Forest Centre. This app is the first of its kind globally, which controls forest care works quality for subsidy payment and in addition, act as crowd sourcing app for forest damage data collection. Wuudis is actively helping Finnish forest authority to build the mobile service infrastructure for better authority control.

The users of Laatumetsä, such as forest owners and contractors found the app extremely useful as the subsidy payment goes on mobile by drastically reducing the payment processing time and paper works. Moreover, the app drives stakeholders towards sustainable forest management.

Leader of the Pioneers

Seppo Huurinainen, CEO and Founder of Wuudis Solutions Oy, is a veteran entrepreneur in developing and commercializing ICT based solutions for forestry and related natural resource-based business. He has over 3 decades of experience in forest and bioenergy sector. He himself owns 500 hectars of forest and understands the exact problems of the sector. His academic background include specialization in GIS, IT, and silviculture with 5 university level degrees.

Huurinainen held several development and research gigs within the forest and agriculture industry and worked for organisations such as the Finnish Forest and Park Service, Metla, the Forestry Centre, Metsäliitto, Stora Enso, and the National Board of Education.

Being from Nordics, we have flat organisational structure, and everybody treated with equal importance. Within our team, we have personnel from diverse technical and business background to promote innovation in the company,” said Huurinainen. “Instead of diversity within the team, we share same vision for the company to become one of the leading IT companies globally to improve forest and related natural resource management and real-time monitoring,” he adds.

R&D and Achievements

Wuudis performs research and development by participating in funded projects by EU Commission and innovation agencies globally. Wuudis has a strong track record in acquiring research and development projects. This and many other facts have established Wuudis in developing the most-cutting edge ICT solutions for forestry and related natural resource sector.

Some of the notable achievements for Wuudis are:

  • Successful funding injections from multiple EU research projects (LogistEC, CASTLE, SLOPE & DataBio projects), EU H2020 SME phase I and European space agency funded project (ICT4Forest) in total 1,5 million €.
  • Green ICT winner 2011(Tekes) and top 3 rankings in 2018 digi action of the year (Atea) in Finland
  • Second prize winner in BDVA (Big Data Value Association) success story award 2019 in Riga
  • Finalist in Big Data&AI Award (DatSci 2019)
  • Wuudis concept funded by Horizon 2020 SME phase 1 grant
  • EU Commission selected Wuudis concept as an innovation with readiness to scale to international markets

Through Wuudis platform we will revolutionize the way forestry business works today, as every stakeholder will be able to generate income from the ecosystem and a win-win situation will be created for everyone in the business value change” states Huurinainen.

Developing new technologies that have the potential to disrupt an industry has never been an easy job, it requires lot of motivation and patience within the team. At Wuudis Solutions, its team is developing futuristic services, so sometimes it faces problems with some prospective clients, who are little hesitant to implement the services as they have to adopt new and improvised operational practices by overcoming old and conventional methods.

“Currently, we are developing the most complete platform service for natural resource management. Hence, integration with various data sources in different formats is necessary. This requires extensive development efforts and thus timeline to commercialization is more than usual” describes Huurinainen.

Moving Ahead

In the view of European space agency Copernicus program, there is ample satellite data available.

To use this high-value data source, there needs data processing capability and usable IT solution to make it accessible for forest and other natural resources industry end-users. Wuudis platform services are covering these needs to drive dynamic forest management and monitoring.

Additionally, Wuudis platform services help users to reduce their site visits as all updated forest resource data is available over smartphone and satellites. This has proved to be a major painkiller to many of their customers during the pandemic.

This year, the company has been focusing on the integration of satellite data on top of Wuudis platform for the benefit of forestry and related natural resource sector. To test these new solutions, it started pilot testing in Spain, Belgium, Finland and in eastern Africa with multiple forest industries, forest management associations and wider stakeholder network.

“These pilots will help us prove our next generation satellite data integration platform service and hence open doors for rapid commercialization benefiting the sector, and hence the whole world,” concludes Huurinainen.