A Mobile Phone Application for the Collection of Opinion Data for Forest Planning Purposes

The last 30 years has seen an increase in environmental, socio-economic, and recreational objectives being considered throughout the forest planning process. In the Finnish context these are considered mainly at the regional level potentially missing out on more local issues and problems. Such local information would be most efficiently collected with a participatory GIS approach. A mobile participatory GIS application called Tienoo was developed as a tool for collecting location-specific opinions of recreational and aesthetical characteristics of forests and forest management. The application also contains information the user can access regarding the practical details of the area, for instance about the recreational infrastructure. The application was tested in Ruunaa National Hiking Area, North Karelia, Eastern Finland. Through this application it is possible to continuously collect geolocated preference information. As a result, the collected opinions have details which can be located in both time and space. This allows for the possibility to monitor the changes in opinions when the stands are treated, and it also allows for easily analyzing the effect of time of year on the opinions. It is also possible to analyze the effect of the spatial location and the forest characteristics on the opinions using GIS analysis.

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