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Metsäsuunnitelma is a Finnish web service that shows your forest properties on a map, stand by stand. For each stand you can see the growing stock, site type, development class and the operations proposed for it. You can write your own notes on stands and attach photos taken in the field.
The service is a practical tool for forest owners and forestry professionals. It does not replace a forest management plan or an assessment by a forestry professional.
Basic use is free. Creating an account, four forest properties up to 200 hectares, maps, stand data, notes and 50 photos cost nothing.
Chargeable are the larger user levels – more photos, higher property limits, route recording and location sharing – and the separately ordered market valuation. Prices are always shown before you order, and nothing is ordered by accident.
The service is owned and maintained by Suomen Metsätilastot Oy.
The service works in an ordinary web browser on a computer, tablet or phone. No separate app needs to be installed.
The phone view is designed for field use: the map fills the screen, the menus are behind the gear and hamburger buttons, and everything works in portrait orientation without turning the phone sideways.
Yes. Open the service in your phone’s browser and choose Add to Home Screen from the browser menu (on iPhone: the share button → Add to Home Screen). After that the service opens from its own icon like an app.
Choose Create account on the front page, enter your name, email address and a password, and answer the verification question. The account is activated immediately and you are signed in right away.
It prevents accounts from being created automatically. Without it, hundreds of junk accounts could appear in the service. The question is deliberately easy – answering it takes a few seconds.
Choose Forgot your password? below the sign-in form and enter the email address your account was created with.
Administration will set a new password for the account and send it to you by email. This is done by hand, so it may take a while. Change the password to one of your own right after signing in, under My account.
Sign in, choose My account and fill in your current and new password under Password. The new password must be at least eight characters long.
First check that there is no typo in the email address and that upper and lower case letters in the password are correct.
If signing in fails eight times in a row, the service blocks attempts for fifteen minutes. Wait 15 minutes and try again. If the problem continues, request a new password under Forgot your password?
A sign-in stays valid for 30 days per device. On a shared computer it is worth signing out after use.
There are two ways:
The property identifier appears on the extract from the property register, the title deed, the deed of sale and the real estate tax decision. The format is municipality-area-group-unit, for example 213-436-3-85.
The stand data is open forest and nature data of the Finnish Forest Centre (CC BY 4.0) and the property boundaries are open data of the National Land Survey of Finland (CC BY 4.0).
The Forest Centre data is based on remote sensing and field sample plots, and it is updated area by area. The data may therefore be out of date, especially if cuttings or silvicultural work have been carried out recently. It is an estimate, not a measurement.
The service calculates the area from the forest stands, not from the total area of the real estate unit. Stands do not include fields, roads, building sites or water areas, so the combined stand area is usually smaller than the area of the property.
Stands are clipped precisely to the property boundary so that parts on the neighbour’s side are excluded. If the property has several parcels, all of them are fetched.
The Forest Centre data does not cover every area – for unproductive land or a recently acquired area the data may be missing entirely.
Yes, the number of properties is not limited. Each property gets its own map and its own list of stands. The properties may be in different municipalities.
Yes. Open the property card on the My forest properties page and choose Delete property. The service asks you to confirm.
Deletion also removes the notes and photos of that property, and they cannot be recovered. The stand data itself can be fetched again by property identifier or imported from an XML file.
No. Your properties are visible only to you. From your account, administration sees only your name, email address, phone number and counts (how many properties, stands and photos) – not the names, locations, stand data, notes or photos.
If you wish, you can share properties you choose with another user of the service, for example your spouse or a forestry professional. Sharing is always your own choice and you can revoke it at any time.
Usually available are the topographic map, background map and aerial image of the National Land Survey of Finland, the Esri aerial image and OpenStreetMap. Change the map from the Background menu.
Administration may limit the selection so that the service stays free. At least one aerial image and one map are always available.
You can choose the colouring from the Colouring menu: development class, main tree species, site type, growing stock volume, age, or the timing of the next operation. The legend at the bottom of the map always explains what the current colours mean.
Tap a stand on the map. The data opens in this order: photos, notes, basic data, next operation and growing stock by tree species. On a phone the data opens full-screen.
A stand typically has several proposed and already completed operations. For clarity the service shows only the next upcoming operation with its year. If several operations fall in the same year, they are shown together. If there are no upcoming operations, the most recent completed operation is shown.
It fetches the stand data again from the Finnish Forest Centre and replaces the current data with the fresh version. Notes and photos are moved to the new stands based on location.
If the property was imported from your own XML file, the service warns you separately: your own data will be replaced by Forest Centre data. In that case download your own XML file first.
Yes. In the map view there is a Download photos button next to Download XML. It downloads all photos of the property as a single ZIP package.
Photos without a location are included without coordinates. A large package is best downloaded on a computer rather than a phone.
Yes. From the map view you can download the forest data XML of the property, and your notes are included in the file in the field defined by the standard. The file opens in other forestry software as well.
Yes. Tap the positioning button on the map; the browser asks for permission and your location is shown on the map. The location is not stored in the service.
Open the stand on the map and type your text in the note field. The note is saved to the stand and shown in the stand data from then on. It is also included when you download the XML.
Open a stand on the map. Below the note field there is a 📷 Take a photo button that opens the phone camera. Once you have taken the photo, it is attached to exactly the stand that is open, and the location comes from the phone’s positioning.
The photo is saved to the service automatically. If positioning is off or no location is available, the photo is still saved and attached to the right stand – it just does not appear as a marker on the map.
Next to it there is also a 🖼 Choose from phone button for attaching a photo that is already in your phone’s pictures.
When you want the photos on your own computer, use the Download photos button in the map view: it downloads all photos of the property at once, with their locations and named by stand.
Open a stand and choose Add photos. You can take a photo directly with the phone camera or pick photos from the gallery. The photo is attached to the stand and appears on the map at the point where it was taken.
The phone stores the location in the photo and the service reads it. If a photo has no location – for example if positioning was switched off – you can set the place yourself by tapping the map.
Ordinary JPEG and PNG images as well as iPhone HEIC images. HEIC is decoded automatically in the browser, so you do not need to convert it yourself.
The storage per user is currently 2 gigabytes. A photo takes about half a megabyte, so this is enough for thousands of photos. You can see your own usage under My account → Storage.
Photos are reduced in the browser before they are sent, so they do not take up the space of the original file and do not burden a mobile connection.
The photo is reduced to a maximum of 1600 pixels wide and compressed. That is plenty for documenting the situation in a stand and looks sharp on a phone and computer screen. For a large print, keep the original photo on your phone.
Yes, if you have opened the property once with a network connection. The stand data, the map tiles you have viewed and the photos are then stored on your phone and open without a network – even if the page is reloaded.
So open the property and browse the map once at home before heading into the forest.
You can. The note is saved on your phone and marked Waiting to be sent. When the connection returns, it is sent to the server automatically. The bottom of the map shows how many notes are waiting.
Yes. The photo is reduced and compressed on your phone and then waits to be sent – just like notes. It appears immediately on the stand and on the map with a dashed outline, and is sent to the service automatically as soon as the connection returns.
The bottom of the map shows how many notes and photos are waiting to be sent.
Note: a waiting photo is stored only in the browser, not in your phone’s photo gallery. Do not clear your browser data before the photos have been sent. The service asks the phone for persistent storage so the photos are not lost if storage runs low.
Signing out removes the stand data, photos and map tiles stored on the phone for security reasons. Notes that have not been sent are kept, so written text is not lost. Still, do not sign out in the forest if something is waiting to be sent.
It is an estimate of the market value of a forest property, prepared by Suomen Metsätilastot Oy. The estimate is based on the growing stock and site types of the property and on realised forest property transactions. It is used to support a sale, a generational transfer or the division of an estate, for example.
On the My forest properties page, choose the property you want the valuation for. The service shows the price and the data that will be sent with the order. Fill in the missing details, accept the transfer of the data and send the order.
The price depends on the area of the property, according to a four-step price list. The current price list is shown on the order form and the price is calculated for the property you choose before you order.
Only the data of the property you choose, as it is at the time of ordering: basic data, growing stock, land classes, site types, development classes and site fertility, plus the contact details you provide. You see all of it before sending.
The order does not give administration access to your other properties, notes or photos.
On the My forest properties page, below the order form, there is a list of your own orders and their status: received, in progress or delivered.
Forest value is a calculation made by the service itself, updated once a month. It shows two figures for each of your forest properties:
These are different markets and neither determines the other. The price of a forest property includes the land, the location and future growth; the timber value covers only the trees standing today.
This is the most important distinction on this page.
Forest value is a tracking figure calculated automatically. A computer produces it, it updates by itself, and no one has checked it.
A market valuation is ordered separately and prepared by Suomen Metsätilastot Oy as human work. It is a document with an author.
If you need a figure for the tax authority, for the division of an estate, for a generational transfer or as loan collateral, you need a market valuation. Forest value is not accepted for those. It exists so that you can see which way your forest assets are developing.
Three sources:
Growth is taken into account: if your stand data is a couple of years old, the calculation grows the stock forward to the present.
Every estimate comes with a range – never a single figure alone. In two cases out of three the actual price falls within that range.
Each estimate also shows a reliability rating, which reflects how many comparable transactions were available. If there are too few, no euro figure is shown at all. An uncertain figure is worse than a missing one: you cannot tell it is wrong, and decisions get made on it.
The method works least well on small properties and on sparsely stocked ones, because those are exactly the properties with the fewest comparable sales.
The most common reasons:
The standing timber value may still be shown even when the market value is not: it comes from stumpage prices rather than from comparable sales.
Yes. Income you record from a harvest appears in the chart as its own bar and is counted towards the total return. Without it a harvest would look like a pure drop in value, even though money reached your account.
The service does not infer income from changes in the growing stock – only you know what the sale actually paid.
You can set a threshold if you want: 3, 5 or 10 per cent. When a month's estimate moves more than that, a note appears on the page. Notifications are off by default – a notification is something you switch on, not something you must remember to switch off.
The service does not send email yet, so the note appears the next time you open the page.
The Forest value page appears in the top bar for every forest owner. Without access the page shows an introduction and an example image; none of your own figures are on it.
From that page you can send a request, after which the administrator opens the feature for your account. It is opened one user at a time.
No. The service reports what has happened and which way the figures have moved. It does not guess the reason for a change and it gives no recommendation to buy, sell or harvest. Investment advice is a different thing from providing an estimate, and the service does not do it.
The formal details of the controller, retention periods and your rights are in the privacy notice.
Your name, email address and, if you wish, phone number, plus which forest properties you have added. In addition, sign-in times and an event log, which are needed for security and for investigating misuse.
The service uses no advertising tracking and no external analytics services.
Not without your permission. Administration sees only the basic details of your account and the counts.
If you need help with a problem, administration can ask you for a temporary viewing permission. The request and its justification appear on your front page, the permission is valid for 24 hours, you can revoke it at any time, and every viewing is recorded in the log.
Not without a separately agreed arrangement. The service has an interface through which a partner maintaining forest resource data can fetch field photos by location, but it is closed by default: administration creates a key for the partner and selects separately whose users’ photos that key can see.
If you feel your photos should not be passed on at all, tell administration and your account will not be linked to any key. The data that is passed on contains no name, email address or notes – only the photo, its location and the time.
The password is not stored as such. A hash is calculated from it (the scrypt method with a random salt). The password cannot be read from the database, not even by administration.
The connection to the service is always encrypted (HTTPS).
The data is on the service provider’s server and backups are taken of it. Photos and stand data are kept in the same place as the account details.
Yes. Contact administration and the account and all data connected to it – properties, stands, notes and photos – will be permanently deleted.
First try changing the background map from the Background menu. If another map loads, the problem is a temporary disturbance in the map service.
If no map loads, reload the page. In areas without coverage, only the map tiles you have viewed earlier online are shown.
Check the format of the identifier (213-436-3-85). Forest Centre stand data does not exist for every area, and for very new properties the data may be missing entirely. In that case import the data from an XML file.
The stand data comes as it is from the Forest Centre open data and the service does not modify it. If the data is out of date, try Update stand data. Errors in the data itself are best reported directly to the Finnish Forest Centre.
Reload the page in your browser. The service detects a new version automatically, but a phone may show an old page if it has been left in the background for a long time.
Contact administration by email. Please say in your message which page the problem appeared on and what you were doing – it speeds up the investigation considerably.