Forests, cornerstone of the EU economy (42% of EU land) and source of multiple social and environmental benefits, need to be managed according to the sustainability principles stated in the EU Forest Strategy. However, forest and wood managers often lack accurate / up-to-date data to support the full wood production cycle coherently. Traditional forest inventories characterize forests from the ecologic and dasometric perspective; but these are expensive and typically planned on a 5 to 10 year basis. Forest data update is often much lower than required for planning forests’ commercial or recreational activities on the basis of these data. Forest change rates demand tools able to monitor, on annual basis, the forest extension, the attributes of available timber, or the different ecosystem services emerged.
MySustainableForest aims at developing a pre-commercial service platform for forest stakeholders, compliant with open and standard interfaces, which integrates Earth Observation data into the forest stakeholders’ decision making processes and operations. It will be implemented on the basis of GMV prototyped service, eoforest and will leverage on partners’ expertise on LiDAR and forest modelling. It engages relevant European public and private forest stakeholders: RAIZ (R&D branch of the Portuguese The Navigator Company), the Croatian Forest Research Institute, Mendel University in Brno, the Forest Owners Associations of Navarra and Lithuania, the French Syndicat des Sylviculteurs du Sud-Ouest, the European Forest Institute, and two innovative Spanish SMEs: MADERA+ and Föra.
The added value of the EO based forest services of will be demonstrated in Atlantic, Alpine and Mediterranean forests across Portugal, Spain, France, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, including a variety of management protocols and forest usages.
More info at the project website: https://mysustainableforest.com/
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 776045.