MELA program and production possibilities of Finnish forests

MELA is a forest decision support system tool generated for Finnish conditions for solving such problems as what are the production potentials of forests and how to manage forests to meet the overall goals of the society and/or an individual forest owner. MELA program was initially developed in the 1970's to analyze the regional and national level wood production potentials based on the sample plot and tree data collected in the national forest inventory. The current MELA version is MELA2016 (Hirvelä et al. 2017).

Since 1970's MELA has been utilized for calculating timber production analysis in several projects based on the national forest inventories e.g. for the composition of

• the Forest 2000 Programme (The Forest 2000 ... 1986, Metsä 2000 ... 1991),
• National Forest Programme 2010 (Nuutinen & Salminen 1999) and 2015 (Salminen & Hirvelä 2008),
• National Forest Strategy 2025 (Kansallinen metsästrategia ... 2015) and 2035 (Kärkkäinen et al. 2022),
• Impact assessments of the Energy and Climate strategy 2008 (Uusivuori et al. 2008) and 2016 (Lehtonen et al. 2016, Koljonen et al. 2017),
• the development of emissions and sinks in the LULUCF sector (Aakkula et al. 2019, Koljonen et al. 2020, Maanavilja et al. 2021, Ollila et al. 2022, Silfver et al. 2024),
• the scenarios for energy and climate policy package (Koljonen et al. 2024, Koljonen et al. 2025a, Koljonen et al. 2025b),
• the impacts of changes in the operating environment on the wood markets (Horne et al. 2025),
• National Forestry Accounting plan for LULUCF sector including forest reference level for period 2021-2025 (National Forestry … 2019) and
• several Regional Forest Programmes.

MELA program is used also in practical forest planning, e.g. in Metsähallitus, in forest companies and in the organizations of the non-industrial private forest owners.

MELA team maintains and improves the MELA program for versatile forest analyses. In the MELA Internet Service, so called MELA Summary reports one can find out estimates for the cutting possibilities and development of Finnish forests based on the most recent NFI data.

• MELA program
• Natural Resources Data service, Forests and Forestry