30/09/2026
Muccians around the world: Arun Gyawali, LUT: FORMEC 2026, Prague, Czech Republic, September 14-18, 2026
The 58th International Symposium on Forestry Mechanization (FORMEC) was held in Prague, Czech Republic, September 14-18, 2026. 58 meetings have been held so far in 20 different countries
and one online conference. There were more than 200 attendees from more than 25 different countries in the
FORMEC 2026.
The main broad content of the conference is to combine experience from worldwide scientists, researchers and practitioners in forest operations and planning on close-to-nature principles and encourage cooperation, gather knowledge and improve exchange of information in forestry profession and science.
The core issues in the FORMEC Symposia are Forest harvesting systems, Wood transportation, Forest Road network planning and construction, Environmental effects of forest operations and Forest work sciences.
I had an Oral presentation for FORMEC 2026.
Topic: ForestFusionNet: A Unified Deep Learning Framework for Multimodal Tree Species Classification in
Young Boreal Forests (Authors: Gyawali Arun, Aalto Mika & Ranta Tapio)
Objective
This research aims to develop and validate ForestFusionNet, a scalable multimodal deep-learning framework that fuses LiDAR-derived 3D structure, high-resolution digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP), Sentinel-2
multispectral time series, and Planet high-resolution multi-temporal imagery to classify tree species at the
individual-tree level in young boreal forests. The work pursues two main objectives: (1) to build a harmonized
multi-sensor dataset and extract complementary features, and (2) to design a unified fusion deep-learning
architecture and rigorously evaluate its accuracy and computational efficiency.
