Information as a key to a knowledge-based forest sector

The forest sector's role in national and regional economies: Clusters, competitive regions, innovation centres and networks as well as their role in globalized markets have become focal topics in economics. However, the understanding of the forest-based industries as an industrial sector generating employment and value added is only recently gaining in importance. The forest sector comprises all industries with a close linkage of their associated economic activities to the common resource wood and therewith to the forest. Its role in national and regional economies notably relates to: 

• An obvious concept of a peculiar sector: The EU concept of the forest sector unified by one common resource or commodity wood with multiple end uses distinguishes it from other sectors, which are generally formed around a group of similar finished products, and which are manifest as such in official statistics (e.g. the automobile industry and its suppliers). 
• An unexpectedly large sector: The segregated assessment of wood-based activities in official statistics and the largely unconsidered role of small enterprises lead to a misconception and underestimation of the sector's actual size in national and regional economies. In fact, the sector accounts in average for 2-3% of the total economy or 10-15% of the producing industries. In the EU, at least 5.4 million people are employed in the total forest sector. Thus it ranks high among other industries, which are generally considered as "strong sectors", e.g. automobiles, chemicals, energy, etc. 
• A sector of regional importance: Recent mappings of outstanding regional clusters and hotspot locations of wood industries with large processing capacities revealed the forest sector’s substantial impact on regional and rural economies, which has so far not been acknowledged explicitly. In fact, the forest sector can even obtain a leading position in regional economies, accounting for up to 20 % of total employment in rural counties, a decisive deviation from the national average of 3 %. 
• An "unknown, sleeping giant": The forest sector’s true size and competitiveness in regional contexts are generally not known to industry managers, associations or governmental bodies - within and outside to the forest sector. Overall, an understanding of the sector's strengths and potentials for regional sustainable development is lacking in politics, the media and the wider public. The fragmented, poorly organized sector needs to join its forces, bridge the gaps between forestry and wood processing, and advocate its case with one voice.

Forest cluster information systems: As in other sectors and domains, the range of fast developing modern communication technologies and services has seen a rapid expansion in the forest sector during the past years. The field focuses on web-based systems, which offer efficient tools supporting the formation of interregional knowledge-based networks. Forest sector information systems in the European Union can be broadly sub-divided into the following types: 

• International / European knowledge databases
• International / European statistics
• National forest inventories
• Specialized forest monitoring systems
• National wood promotion platforms, topical info services
• Regional forest management information systems
• B2B marketing platfoms, wood marketing, contact directories

Overall, information systems in the forest sector see a continuous growth, notably on the national and sub-national scale, which substantially enlarges the online available knowledge base. At the same time the huge, the rather scattered amounts of information lack proper selection, filtering, pooling and efficient direction for the users. The major challenges of tomorrow's forest sector-specific information and knowledge management systems are a stronger integration, quality assurance and user friendliness.

IN2WOOD's RTD questions

The overall objective is to build up a framework for a forest-sector INFORMATION SYSTEM for inter- and intra-regional networking and knowledge transfer

The following topics are targeted: