Following on from winning the Finnish Quality Innovation Award in November 2023, we announce that our jointly developed solution for early-stage bark beetle outbreaks has now been awarded the prestigious International Quality Innovation Award 2023.
The Innovation of Innovations prize, the lead category of the programme, was awarded our AI-based application for identifying and helping to prevent insect damage in forests. The solution addresses a major threat to forest, ecosystem health and forest carbon sinks, covering currently 100.000s of hectares of forests and assets values in the €100millions.
At the same time, CollectiveCrunch and Metsä Group won the “Circular economy and carbon neutrality innovations ” award.
The solution tracks stress levels of relevant tree species over multiple seasons to identify at-risk areas. Calibrated with ground truth from Metsä Group forests it identifies early-stage outbreaks of bark beetle pests. Early detection is crucial for forest managers to respond quickly and to limit damages and value loss.
“Climate change has rapidly increased the risks to the health of Finland’s forests. In 2022, there were more bark beetle infestations than ever before, and they occurred further north than previously seen. At that time, we decided that we needed a real-time method for identifying insect damage to take action to preserve forest health and carbon sinks in a changing climate. The artificial intelligence application developed with CollectiveCrunch helps us and forest owners together to take care of the health of our forests and carbon sinks. I am truly proud of this recognition.” Says Olli Leino, SVP Development at Metsä Group.
“At CollectiveCrunch, we have developed data and AI-based solutions for inventorying and monitoring forests, their carbon stocks, and biodiversity. As the bark beetle spreads northward, we began to explore how our technology could be used to detect damage caused by the beetle in real-time. We are grateful to have found Metsä Group as our partner to bring this application to the end customers. We are ready to deploy our solution over any spruce covered areas susceptible for this pest anywhere in the world.” says Dr. Juha Koponen, CEO of CollectiveCrunch Oy.