Spotlights
December 12, 2025
Bringing accuracy to mushroom measuring with RealityScan Mobile
For centuries, people across northern Europe, Siberia, and Asia have used chaga mushrooms in folk medicine.
While this knobbly, charcoal-like parasitic fungus might not score exceptionally in the looks department, it’s highly prized thanks to its reputation for boosting the immune system, fighting cancer, and lowering cholesterol. In fact, it’s one of the most antioxidant-rich natural products in the world, with significantly higher antioxidant properties than even blueberries.
With a rising profile across the Western world, chaga mushrooms are now being “farmed” on an industrial scale.
While this knobbly, charcoal-like parasitic fungus might not score exceptionally in the looks department, it’s highly prized thanks to its reputation for boosting the immune system, fighting cancer, and lowering cholesterol. In fact, it’s one of the most antioxidant-rich natural products in the world, with significantly higher antioxidant properties than even blueberries.
With a rising profile across the Western world, chaga mushrooms are now being “farmed” on an industrial scale.
Deep in the forests of Finland, KÄÄPÄ Forest—a division of KÄÄPÄ Biotech—manages the largest chaga mushroom cultivation network in the world.
As one of the world’s leading innovators in sustainable mushroom farming, KÄÄPÄ Biotech has embraced cutting-edge technologies, including the use of photorealistic 3D scanning to assess mushroom growth.
As one of the world’s leading innovators in sustainable mushroom farming, KÄÄPÄ Biotech has embraced cutting-edge technologies, including the use of photorealistic 3D scanning to assess mushroom growth.
Courtesy of KÄÄPÄ Biotech
Photorealistic 3D scanning for accuracy
To farm chaga mushrooms, you must be in it for the long haul.
Scientists at KÄÄPÄ Forest insert chaga spores into living Birch trees and leave the mushroom to grow for ten or fifteen years. Around this time, the mushroom undergoes a period of rapid growth, bursting through the tree bark, at which point it's ready to harvest.
“Chaga has been vastly over-harvested in many parts of the world,” says Heikki Kiheri, Scientific Director at KÄÄPÄ Biotech. “A single conk can take decades to grow on the tree, and it’s an inherently unsustainable practice to be taking it in large quantities.”
In Finland, the government has stepped in and regulates the harvesting of chaga to avoid the excessive depletion of this valuable resource.
Producing chaga effectively in forests—let alone in a sustainable and regulated way—was never guaranteed. In the early days, no one was sure whether it was even possible to inoculate a tree and grow chaga from scratch.
But if it was going to happen anywhere, it was going to happen in Finland. The country has a proud history of maintaining “economic forests”—an approach to the management of forests that combines sustainability with an emphasis on supporting livelihoods, industry, and crucial environmental services.
“People did not really believe it was possible to grow chaga in forests,” explains Franz Bertenbreiter Félix, R&D Operations Specialist at KÄÄPÄ Biotech. “Today, we have inoculated close to two million trees across Finland,” adds Kiheri.
The KÄÄPÄ Forest team goes out every year to survey how the chaga is growing—and that's where RealityScan Mobile comes in.
Courtesy of KÄÄPÄ Biotech
They use a mobile device to capture images of the mushrooms, which the application then reconstructs into a highly detailed 3D model. By regularly repeating the process, the team can compare the resultant models over time and get an accurate visual representation of the mushroom as it develops.
“RealityScan Mobile gives us a really quick way of scanning the chaga and being able to measure its growth year on year,” explains Kiheri.
KÄÄPÄ can then share the progress with researchers, investors worldwide, and the farm owners—all in photorealistic detail.
Beyond their commercial goals, the scientists at KÄÄPÄ Forest are committed to preserving chaga for generations to come. Cultivating chaga brings meaningful biodiversity and climate benefits—the amount of fungi and deadwood in a forest are strong indicators of biodiversity, and chaga cultivation strengthens both. It immediately increases the presence of fungi in the forest, directly supporting overall ecosystem health.
“Our goal is to safeguard the future of chaga, and a key part of that mission is optimizing how it’s grown,” says Kiheri. “This is why RealityScan Mobile is so important to us: it helps us cultivate more responsibly and ultimately protect chaga for the long term.”
“RealityScan Mobile gives us a really quick way of scanning the chaga and being able to measure its growth year on year,” explains Kiheri.
KÄÄPÄ can then share the progress with researchers, investors worldwide, and the farm owners—all in photorealistic detail.
Beyond their commercial goals, the scientists at KÄÄPÄ Forest are committed to preserving chaga for generations to come. Cultivating chaga brings meaningful biodiversity and climate benefits—the amount of fungi and deadwood in a forest are strong indicators of biodiversity, and chaga cultivation strengthens both. It immediately increases the presence of fungi in the forest, directly supporting overall ecosystem health.
“Our goal is to safeguard the future of chaga, and a key part of that mission is optimizing how it’s grown,” says Kiheri. “This is why RealityScan Mobile is so important to us: it helps us cultivate more responsibly and ultimately protect chaga for the long term.”
Courtesy of KÄÄPÄ Biotech
Bringing chaga cultivation into the 21st century
Kiheri explains that when the team started to survey the growth of chaga at their forest sites, it was challenging to determine a methodology for judging how well they were growing.
“You can visually assess them and say ‘that looks like it’s working’. But to really understand it and to forecast the future, you need more precise methods,” he says.
This realization led them to 3D scanning. After assessing a range of scientific equipment—“There are different types of devices but they’re quite expensive and challenging to utilize in the field,” says Kiheri—the team settled on RealityScan Mobile.
“I’ve worked in ecology for quite a few years and most of the methods you do for ecological measurement are very old-school,” says Kiheri. “You put down a tape measure, you go out and you do transsects, you take the heights and the widths and everything. For some of the work I’ve done before, if I had [RealityScan Mobile] available back then, it could have saved me hundreds of hours.”
As well as saving a significant amount of time in the field, adopting RealityScan Mobile has the potential to make the whole mushroom-observation process more cost-efficient—as well as providing more accurate data.
With different team members heading out into the forest to measure the chaga using calipers—often years apart—measurements could vary significantly and inaccuracies could sneak in.
Courtesy of KÄÄPÄ Biotech
By scanning the conks with RealityScan Mobile, the team achieves pinpoint accuracy and produces much more reliable data. “We can do this measurement every year, so we have a very strong dataset going into the future,” says Kiheri.
The ability to easily take such accurate measurements enables KÄÄPÄ Forest to get the most chaga out of each tree, providing the best return investment to the landowners and helping to ensure the business model remains viable.
“The simplicity is what's really important, because that's key to good science,” says Kiheri. “Anybody can come and do these measurements without any bias or mistakes, and using an app on your phone like RealityScan Mobile makes this as simple as possible.”
The ability to easily take such accurate measurements enables KÄÄPÄ Forest to get the most chaga out of each tree, providing the best return investment to the landowners and helping to ensure the business model remains viable.
“The simplicity is what's really important, because that's key to good science,” says Kiheri. “Anybody can come and do these measurements without any bias or mistakes, and using an app on your phone like RealityScan Mobile makes this as simple as possible.”
Download RealityScan Mobile
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