Starting point How can monitoring approaches enable early interventions?
Forests are characterized by their diverse functions as habitats, climate regulators, protectors of urban infrastructure, and suppliers of raw materials. Sustainable forest management requires routine as well as random inspections to assess the condition and accordingly plan and implement targeted interventions. Relevant questions in this context are: What is the biomass in the forest? Where are damaged areas after a storm? Are there places that should be reforested? How are reforestation areas developing? Where does it make sense to restructure forests towards more climate-resilient tree species?
Can manual inventories be supported by data-based monitoring approaches to answer such questions?
What to do Solution: Application-specific processing of satellite-based earth observation systems
Satellite-based earth observation systems like ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellites provide image data of the Earth’s surface with a spatial resolution of up to 10 meters and a temporal resolution of 5 days. Application-specific processing of satellite images allows continuous monitoring of large forest areas. By combining this with existing data from manual inventories, data-driven models can derive relevant indicators. Thus, the monitoring system can automatically provide information about relevant areas to initiate manual inspections and interventions in a targeted way.
Your benefits Benefits: Automated and up-to-date overview of large areas
- Automated condition detection with high temporal resolution
- Up-to-date overall view of forest condition
- Large-area coverage (from Würzburg to Bavaria, Germany, and all the way to Europe)
- Targeted identification of focus areas
- Reduction of manual inspections with high time expenditure