EUFODOS: European Forest Downstream Services – Improved Information on Forest Structure and Damage

Forests play a key role in the European economy and environment. This role incorporates ecological functions which can be affected by the occurrence of insect infestations, forest fire, heavy snowfall or windfall events. Local or Regional Authorities (LRAs) thus require detailed information on the degradation status of their forests to be able to take appropriate measures for their forest management plans. In the EUFODOS project, state-of-the-art satellite and laser scanning technologies are used to provide forest authorities with cost-effective and comprehensive information on forest structure and damage. One of the six test sites is located in the Austrian province of Styria where regional forest authorities have expressed a strong need for detailed forest parameters in protective forest. As airborne laser-scanning data is available, it will be utilized to derive detailed forest parameters such as the upper forest border line, tree height, growth classes, forest density, vertical structure or volume. At the current project status, the results of (i) the forest border line, (ii) the segmentation of forest stands and (iii) the tree top detection are available and presented including accuracy assessment and interim results are shown for timber volume estimations. The final results show that the forest border can be mapped operationally with an overall accuracy of almost 99% from LiDAR data. For the segmentation of forest stands, a comparison of the automatically derived result with visual-manual delineation showed in general a more detailed segmentation result, but for all visual-manual segments a congruence of 87% within a 4 m buffer. Tree top detections were compared to stem numbers estimated based on angle-count samplings in a field campaign, which led to a correlation coefficient (R) of 0.79

EU-wide maps of growing stock and above-ground biomass in forests based on remote sensing and field measurements

The overall objective of this study was to combine national forest inventory data and remotely sensed data to produce pan-European maps on growing stock and above-ground woody biomass for the two species groups " broadleaves" and " conifers" An automatic up-scaling approach making use of satellite remote sensing data and field measurement data was applied for EU-wide mapping of growing stock and above-ground biomass in forests. The approach is based on sampling and allows the direct combination of data with different measurement units such as forest inventory plot data and satellite remote sensing data. For the classification, data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) were used. Comprehensive field measurement data from national forest inventories for 98,979 locations from 16 countries were used for which tree species and growing stock estimates were available. The classification results were evaluated by comparison with regional estimates derived independently from the classification from national forest inventories. The validation at the regional level shows a high correlation between the classification results and the field based estimates with correlation coefficient r=0.96 for coniferous, r=0.94 for broadleaved and r=0.97 for total growing stock per hectare. The mean absolute error of the estimations is 25m3/ha for coniferous, 20m3/ha for broadleaved and 25m3/ha for total growing stock per hectare. Biomass conversion and expansion factors were applied to convert the growing stock classification results to carbon stock in above-ground biomass. As results of the classification, coniferous and broadleaved growing stock as well as carbon stock of the above-ground biomass is mapped on a wall-to-wall basis with a spatial resolution of 500m×500m per grid cell. The mapped area is 5millionkm2, of which 2millionkm2 are forests, and covers the whole European Union, the EFTA countries, the Balkans, Belarus, the Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turke

Observing forest biomass globally

Terrestrial biomass is considered as an essential indicator for the monitoring of the Earth's ecosystem and climate. In recent years, many regional biomass datasets have been produced. These were obtained using a wide range of methods - from pure remote sensing RS to the collection of field measurements. The Biomass Geo-Wiki is a new tool from the family of Geo-Wiki.org, which has been launched to bring together different biomass datasets so that they can be viewed and compared with high resolution imagery on Google Earth. The ultimate goal is to perform gap analysis, cross-product validation, harmonization and hybrid product development leading to improved global biomass datasets in the future

Best practice guidelines on the maintenance and regular up-date of the biomass cost supply data for EU, Western Balkan countries, Moldavia, Turkey and Ukraine

S2Biom project grant agreement n 608622201