Will the Internet
of Trees Be the
Next Game
Changer?
Can the Internet of Things help foresters better “see” their
trees?
Michael Fitzgerald
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Will the Internet of Trees Be the Next Game
Changer?
ERIC HANSEN AND SCOTT LEAVENGOOD (OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY), INTERVIEWED BY MICHAEL FITZGERALD
Can the Internet of Things help foresters better “see” their trees?
Fitzgerald, contributing editor at MIT Sloan Management
Review, conducts the interview.
When we hear about the Internet of Things,
we don’t think Internet of Trees. What’s
happening in this field?
Forestry and its related industries are something of a
technology laggard, unlike agriculture, where cuttingedge technologies are being aggressively adopted. But the
prospect of the industry building an “Internet of Trees” to
drive efficiency, improve quality, and improve awareness
of soil conditions is emerging. Eric Hansen and Scott
Leavengood, both professors at Oregon State University’s
Wood Science and Engineering department, discuss how
the Internet of Things is being used in the forest sector
and the implications for the industry’s future. Michael
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On the forestry side of things, there are two general areas
that are important. One of them is ecological monitoring.
That is done in lots of different ways now, often with
people out there measuring things. As we learn how to
improve the measurement process so that we can collect
data continuously, monitoring can be improved and made
more precise. If we think about all the forest fires that
occur every year, more sophisticated sensoring would
allow early detection of the biggest risk areas and the
potential for isolating specific locations. That’s being done
now at some level with satellites, but the ability to sensor
everywhere would be an important and maybe even costsaving next step.
In New Zealand, log segregation is a big thing with their
plantation forestry. Being able to identify wood quality in
a standing tree, and to send the right log to the right mill
is a really hot topic right now. And in Europe, there was a
multinational project called Flexwood (flexible wood
supply chain), that focused on sending the right trees to
the right processing facilities.
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Sawmills, in general, are set up to do one thing very fast
and very well: make structural lumber or make
appearance-grade lumber for furniture or cabinets or
whatever. For example, a log in Oregon — a larger log,
meaning not a pulp kind of log — could go to a sawmill
or to a mill that produces structural products like
plywood or laminated veneer lumber. The highest-quality
log ideally would go to the mill that requires higherquality wood. Ideally, some sort of in-forest monitoring of
the trees or grading in standing trees has already been
done so they know right away which facility to send it to,
whether it’s a log that’s graded best for furniture or
millwork or structural lumber or plywood. But if it’s
already at the sawmill, it may not make sense to reship it.
If it had been determined in the forest where it should go,
you would be maximizing value for the whole value
chain.
There’s been some sorting of logs in forests.
How are they doing it?
They’ve tried various sensors, like near-infrared or
another one where they bore into the tree and remove a
small segment of wood that they then scan for density.
There’s a device that was developed in New Zealand,
called the Hitman, where they thump a standing tree to
force sound waves through it, and from that they can
estimate wood density.
Is this Internet of Trees hypothetical or
actual? How might it emerge?
It’s hypothetical. The ideal situation would be to have
some sensors out in the field that would be sending data,
but to do that they would have to be embedded within the
tree itself. I don’t know of anything like that that’s being
done, except in high-value situations, such as trees used
for wood for musical instruments.
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What I see as the next frontier in this field is networking
machines in the mill. Right now, the mills get the logs and
scan them with equipment like laser systems, ultrasound,
and video cameras to determine what’s inside them and
how to get the best value from them. But the machines
within the mill aren’t talking to each other, so no one
knows whether they’re getting what they expected from
the logs. Once information can flow from one machine to
another, they can bring that information back into the
forest and say, “Well, we harvested from this north part of
the ridge. What kind of grade yield did we get there?”
versus “What did we get from that other part of the
forest?” That’s what I think is on the horizon.
How does the industry normally bring in new
technologies?
Different kinds of companies introduce them differently.
The big corporations, like International Paper, either
eliminated their forestry totally or, like Weyerhaeuser,
moved to a REIT (real estate investment trust), a totally
different business model. There’s one- or two-mill family
operations — no forestry. That suggests to me that they
wouldn't necessarily be thinking about monitoring in the
forests or about actually the quality of the fiber. There are
some large regional operations that are still integrated.
The first thing that they’re all going to look for is either
cost savings or increased efficiency, especially in the
processing side. With sensors, for example, they’re going
to first think about how to decrease the costs either in
forestry or in the mill or how to increase the fiber yield.
That suggests to me that they wouldn’t necessarily be
thinking about monitoring in the forests or about actually
assessing the quality of the fiber.
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It is such a fragmented industry. You cannot be
competitive as a sawmill in this country without
advanced technology. The cost of the raw material for a
sawmill is about 70% of your cost of production, so you
have to make darn certain you get every piece you can out
of that thing because the margins are so low. That’s what’s
driving their investment in innovation for optimization
and scanning systems.
One of the challenges of connecting the Internet-ofThings approach to the timber resource itself is figuring
out who benefits. Is it going to be the mill? Will the mills
pay more for the logs if they get the right logs because
they know now which specific part of the forest will give
them better quality wood? Probably not. That’s an
implementation challenge.
How do you think you would actually
implement an Internet of Trees? Would you
need to have every tree covered?
It’s going to be very dependent upon the forest. There’s a
koa forest in Hawaii where the company managing it uses
RFID tags on each and every tree. Those kinds of tags are
also being used in tropical forests, often to eliminate
illegal logging, by tracking when something is moving
that shouldn’t have been. Koa is typically used for very
high-end products, so that would be one end of the
spectrum. When it comes to something more industrial,
like plantation forestry in Mississippi, then I think it’s
going to be monitoring an area of forest rather than an
individual tree. There’s just not enough value there to
warrant individual monitoring.
You’ve said that you could see the Internet of
Things for forest products being used in
particle board or doors and windows and
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. All rights reserved.
other household objects. How far away is that
from happening?
There’s a company in South Carolina that’s developed an
RFID system where they can basically have an RFID tag
on every utility pole. They can track the history of what’s
been done to the pole — whether there’s vegetation
growing on it, whether it’s been repaired or refurbished
somehow. With the history of that pole over time, they
essentially have an inventory system. Right now, tags are
being added after the fact, but I don’t think there’s any
reason it couldn’t be added at any stage after the
treatment process.
Putting sensors in doors and windows and furniture is
pretty advanced. Underlayment — in-home moisture
sensing in floors — was just totally pie-in-the-sky
thinking. I have no evidence that anybody’s even thought
about that before, let alone pursued it. But that’s the kind
of thing I really wish every homeowner had, so that they
wouldn’t be tearing up floors to find out whether things
are actually okay or talking about a demolition and
reconstruction because the floor is already too damaged
to renovate.
The biggest topic right now in wood products innovation
is cross-laminated timber (CLT). Think about high-rise
structures, 30-story structures, where all the structural
material is wood. This cross-laminated timber is like
plywood on steroids. The challenge, of course, is if it gets
wet, and stays wet, you’ve got a problem. In-place
monitoring of these wood structural components would
be ideal, because you could see how they are being
affected by changes in the environment and by small
leaks and whether or not they actually do dry out.
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How prevalent is the use of analytics in the
What might the Internet of Things mean for
forestry industry?
the forestry industry?
On the forestry side, I think that there’s pretty effective
use of big data. On the mill side, there’s a huge amount of
scanning that goes on, and typically that information is
used at one particular place in the mill and it doesn’t
extend beyond that. For example, where the log is first
broken down into a few pieces, it’s scanned so that it can
be positioned to maximize yield. Right now, that
information typically doesn’t flow to the next machine
sensor, so there’s a huge opportunity there to be better
networked, to make better use of that data. I would say
that currently almost all of the operations are really
poorly placed to do that, and I don’t think the industry
has the expertise and maybe not even the computing
power to do it effectively.
We have real challenges in the sector with integration of
supply chain. Part of that’s a people factor; part of it’s a
technological factor. When you start getting the
technology in place, where you really have knowledge
about what’s happening at every step along the way, it
becomes a more efficient system, and, in theory, the
supply chain would be more competitive in the United
States than in other parts of the world. This could bring
more manufacturing back to the U.S. A lot of the
furniture manufacturing has gone to China, but the costs
there are increasing and now those manufacturing
operations are moving to places like Vietnam and some
are being re-sourced back to the United States. Maybe the
Internet of Things leads to a more competitive forestproducts industry and maybe to more manufacturing in
the U.S.
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About the Author
Michael Fitzgerald is a contributing
editor at MIT Sloan Management
Review.
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