Military Forests and Estates operates unique timber registration system to ensure more effective timber resources management

For its timber operations, Military Forests and Estates, an MOD-run, state-owned enterprise (SOE), uses a complex timber marking and registration system. This enables Military Forests and Estates to exercise more effective timber resources management and to have a detailed overview of all timber movements from the moment of harvesting, through to its storage and dispatch to customers. How the system works was today seen by Defence Minister Jaroslav Naď and Environment Minister Ján Budaj.

Defence Minister Jaroslav Naď said: “The timber registration system used by Military Forests and Estates is truly unique – each and every piece of timber is under the company's watchful eye. To a significant extent, Military Forests and Estates ensures effective and thorough delivery of woodlands management under the company's remit. This is an important and unique project which may be inspirational for other forest managers as well.”

Environment Minister Ján Budaj said: “At the end of last week MPs backed the protection of national parks by voting for the Nature and Landscape Conservation (Amendment) Bill. After the transfer of state-owned forest lands in national parks to the remit of the SVK State Nature Conservation Authority, we need a high quality registration system to make sure there is no longer any illegal logging and timber disappearance from our forests.”

Director of Military Forests and Estates SOE Ján Jurica said: “The system is unique, because each and every piece of harvested timber or log pile has a unique identifier in the form of a barcode and all relevant logging data such as timber volume, quality, woodland area and other relevant information is entered into the system on site.”

Foresters of Military Forests and Estates SOE forward the data to a website, which means that the state of logging and movements from the logging site are continuously updated and available online. The database with information on logging over the past 16 years provides unique statistics for the purposes of analysis and planning in Military Forests and Estates.

In Military Forests and Estates - Kežmarok Branch, the system is supplemented by a video camera device with automatic number plate recognition and a radio-frequency identification (RFID) reader device. The system records the movement of timber trucks based on video footage and number plate recognition and scans the RFID tag and transfers data on the delivery list to the website.