The centre, known by its Catalan initials CTFC and based in Solsona in central Catalonia, is a forestry research institute and the coordinator of SINTETIC, short for “Single item identification for forest production, protection and management”. It is a Horizon Europe project under grant agreement 101082051, running from 1 June 2023 to 30 November 2027, with a total cost of 8,634,188.50 euros and an EU contribution of 7,547,650 euros. Its aim is an ICT based traceability system following individual trees, logs and boards across the whole forest based value chain, held together by a central geodatabase.

Three partners ran the pilot. Simtrona, the RFID traceability solutions manufacturer in the consortium, supplied the tag and the insertion method. Arboreal, a Swedish partner, supplied TreeID, the log recognition system; its other SINTETIC tool is TreeScanner, a smartphone LiDAR app for measuring standing trees. Fustes Jane, a Catalan sawmill, hosted the trial and provided the log yard where the timber dried.

Inside the log, not on the bark

Surface identification is the incumbent this trial was designed to beat, and its weakness is familiar to anyone who has worked a log yard. Paint, crayon marks, stapled labels and nailed plates all sit on the outside of the log, where sun bleaches them, moisture lifts them and handling knocks them off. Lose the mark and you lose the link between the log and everything recorded about where it was felled and what grade it is.

Simtrona’s answer is to put the device inside the wood. The chip is seated into an insertion support on an adapted axe, and a single strike drives it into the log, so the surrounding timber closes over it. That leaves the transponder shielded by the wood itself against breakage, against the checks and splits that open up as a log dries, and against rough handling in the yard. It is also quick: CTFC’s own images show an operator marking logs in the stack with one swing of the axe.

What the 87.3% figure actually measures

The headline number needs reading carefully, because it is easy to attribute to the wrong component. The 87.3% is the overall correct identification rate of the combined system, 48 logs out of 55 after months of weather exposure, and CTFC states explicitly that the seven misses are attributable to image quality, not to a failure of the device or the software. The second figure, 100% accuracy within validated identifications, speaks to confidence: where the system returned an identification it accepted, it was right, so the pilot produced no false positives.

The division of labour is the point. The embedded chip carries the unique identity of each log and keeps carrying it through drying and handling. Arboreal’s TreeID image recognition is what was scored across those 55 logs, matching a log’s visible end grain back to its record. The correct reading is not that a tag failed 12.7% of the time, but that identity survived the yard and that the imaging side of the stack is where the remaining work sits.

Why the timing matters

Antonio Ruano, a researcher on the SINTETIC project at the Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia, put the result in regulatory terms: “Digitalizing the forestry sector is not merely a matter of operational efficiency, but of data sovereignty and transparency. Traceability reliability is the only guarantee to certify the legal origin of timber, strictly comply with the new European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and maximize the added value of every tree harvested from our forests. If the data flow breaks, the system fails; SINTETIC proves that we can keep information integrity intact under real-world conditions.”

That deadline is close. The EU Deforestation Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1115, obliges operators placing commodities including wood on the EU market to show the material is deforestation free and legally produced. Regulation (EU) 2025/2650, published in December 2025, pushed application back by a further 12 months: large operators must meet their main obligations from 30 December 2026, while natural persons and micro and small enterprises have until 30 June 2027. Durable single item identity is one of the few ways a sawmill can hold a documented chain from stump to board rather than reconstructing it from paperwork, part of the wider push covered in our sustainability section.

What a 55 log pilot proves is worth stating plainly: this is durability evidence, not a deployment. It shows an axe inserted transponder and a recognition layer holding identity through an extended period of outdoor natural drying at a working sawmill, not how the method behaves across species, at thousands of logs a week, or at a reader gate on a moving truck. Neither CTFC nor Simtrona publishes the frequency band or air interface protocol for this tag, which matters because reading through damp wood is a known RF problem and the band largely decides how well it is handled: our RFID glossary covers those trade-offs. SINTETIC runs to 30 November 2027, so there is time to scale the test and publish the detail.

Read more at https://blog.ctfc.cat/en/the-sintetic-project-validates-the-reliability-and-digital-traceability-of-timber-after-months-of-outdoor-drying/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.