Introduction—State of the Art of Technology and Market Potential for Big Data in Forestry

Forest monitoring is undergoing rapid changes due to the growing data volumes, developing data processing technologies and increasing monitoring requirements. The DataBio forestry pilots set out to demonstrate how big data approaches can support the forestry sector to get full benefit of the evolving technologies and to meet the increasing monitoring requirements. In this introductory chapter, we describe underlying technical and market forces driving the forestry sector toward big data approaches, and give short overviews on the forestry pilots to be presented in the following chapters.