Summary Reader Response #4
In the article "How Artificial Intelligence, Robots Enhance Forest Sustainability in Finland", McQueen (2019) states that the Finnish Forest Centre is in charge of overseeing the conservation of Finland's forests and hence came up with an ambitious solution to use robots to autonomously execute most of the forest conservation tasks. McQueen mentions that the data used has to be precise and attainable before the Finnish Forest Centre can use it to train the robots. Aerial and lidar imagery is used to construct forest inventories and record tree measurements and information on species. The data the robots need is then placed in a geographic information system (GIS). The development director of the Finnish Forest Centre, Hamalainen, and his team see robots bringing benefits. People owning more than 65% of Finland’s forests can have simpler and more proactive management of their forests. McQueen reports that the Finnish Forest Centre is also using Artificial intelligence (AI)