Making forest monitoring cheaper and closer to society: The LIFE+ Project "SMART4Action"

LIFE SMART4Action (Sustainable Monitoring And Reporting To Inform Forest- and. Environmental Awareness and Protection. LIFE13 ENV/IT/000813) intends to redesign forest monitoring and its information and reporting system in Italy. It is designed over the period September 2014 - March 2018 and will attempt to ensure financial sustainability to forest monitoring, despite budget restrictions, whilst maintaining scientific reliability. The project has two main goals: . design a new system to reduce the current annual costs by 30%, while recognizing the importance of national and regional statistics on key variables linked to sustainable forest management and ecosystem services; and . to improve communication with, and data transfer to, relevant stakeholders and citizens through a participatory process. The analysis of the available data series of forest monitoring data will permit to optimize the number of plots, the frequency and the distribution of the activities, to maximize the information, and identify possible areas were monitoring and modeling can be fruitfully integrated. To increase awareness about forest related issues and the importance of forest monitoring, SMART4Action will develop mechanisms to involve local people in plot management and basic monitoring for readily measurable variables, with local conferences and courses, synthetic result sheets at regional scale, and web-based and smartphone applications to obtain an active involvement of citizens. Present and historical monitoring data will also be shared online using geospatial standard services. Here, we intend to present the project at its very beginning in order to explore the possibility of interaction and synergy with other on-going activities