1 A mobile phone application for the collection of opinion data for forest planning purposes 1 Annika Kangas 1 , Jussi Rasinmäki 2 , Kyle Eyvindson 1 , Philip Chambers 1 2 1) Department of Forest Sciences, P.O.BOX 27, 00014 University of Helsinki 3 2) Simosol Oy, Rautatietori 4, 11130 Riihimäki, Finland 4 5 One Sentence Summary: A mobile phone application was created for the purposes of collecting 6 the opinions of visitors to state managed forests in Finland so that this information can be utilized in 7 the forest planning process. 8 9 Abstract: 10 The last 30 years has seen an increase in environmental, socio-economic and recreational objectives 11 being considered throughout the forest planning process. In the Finnish context these are considered 12 mainly at the regional level potentially missing out on more local issues and problems. Such local 13 information would be most efficiently collected with a participatory GIS approach. A mobile 14 participatory GIS application called Tienoo was developed as a tool for collecting location specific 15 opinions of recreational and aesthetical characteristics of forests and forest management. The 16 application also contains information the user can access regarding the practical details of the area, 17 for instance about the recreational infrastructure. The application was tested in Ruunaa National 18 Hiking Area, North Karelia, Eastern Finland. Through this application it is possible to continuously 19 collect geo-located preference information. As a result, the collected opinions have details which 20 can be located in both time and space. This allows for the possibility to monitor the changes in 21 opinions when the stands are treated, and it also allows for easily analyzing the effect of time of 22 year on the opinions. It is also possible to analyze the effect of the spatial location and the forest 23 characteristics on the opinions using GIS analysis. 24 Key words: Participatory GIS, public participation, forest planning, location specific values 25