Heureka

General System description

System name: Heureka

Brief overview

The Heureka DSS is a system for multi-purpose forestry planning and analysis. It consists of a suite of freely available software. It is developed by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

The first official version of the DSS was released in September 2009, and is currently being tested and improved.

Scope of the system

The system covers the whole decision support process from data inventory to tools for selecting among plan alternatives with multi-criteria decision making techniques. The system is designed for both large-scale and small-scale forestry.

The utilities handled today are

• timber and bio-fuel production,
• carbon sequestration,
• biodiversity, and
• recreation.

The system consists of several applications:

• StandWise - for stand-level analysis of silviculture treatments and development
• PlanWise - for forest-level planning and analysis
• PlanEval - for multi-critera decision analysis, to help comparing plans generated in PlanWise
• RegWise - for regional and national scenario analysis
• Ivent - an application for field inventory - plotwise sampling of single-tree data (for Windows mobile devices)
• PlanStart - used for project initiation and data preparation (mainly import of data from different data sources)
• In addition, a ArcGIS tool has been developed for computing habitat suitability maps for a number of indicator species.

System origin

• The system has been developed as a central part of the Heureka's research programme that was carried out during 2001-2009 by SLU and Skogforsk. A dedicated unit at SLU is now responsible for system maintenance and development.
• The system was developed by a team of 4-5 professional developers.

Related systems

Heureka aims to eventually replace two Swedish former DSSs^[1]:

• The Hugin system, and
• The Forest Management Planning Package.

Platform

• Windows XP and later
• SQL Server as database server (SQL Server Express can be used and is is free)
• Developed in Visual Studio 2005, programming language C#
• Third party software: see more info here.

User interface

Availability

• The system is freely available and can be downloaded from the internet. However, the system is not open source for the time being.
• Currently, there are about 300 registered "downloaders". One forest company and one forest owners association have started to implement the system.

References

Cited references

1. ↑ ANDERSSON, M., B. DAHLIN et M. MOSSBERG (2005): The Forest Time Machine — a multi-purpose forest management decision-support system. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 49, 114–128.

External Resources

• Homepage: http://heureka.slu.se/wiki
• The Heureka Research Programme. Final Report for Phase 1, October 2002–September 2005. Alnarp, Umeå and Uppsala. (pdf available)
• LÄMÅS, T., G. STÅHL et B. DAHLIN: Facts About Heureka (pdf available)
• Heureka annual report 2006 (in Swedish). (Heureka Årsrapport 2006)