PILOT : FOREST DAMAGE REMOTE SENSING

Earth Observation (EO) data from multispectral optical aerial, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and satellite sensors present the optimal way to timely collect information on land cover over areas of various sizes. Particularly the availability of the Copernicus Sentinel-2 data and the applicable data policy present a great opportunity for developing low cost commercial applications of EO downstream services in monitoring of the environment.

In parallel, FMI is developing a new methodology for forest health assessment based on Copernicus satellite data focusing on technological development of the processing of Sentinel-2 optical and Sentinel-1 radar data. This allows us to assess the forest health of the entire area of Czech Republic. In addition, the forest owners will benefit from publicly available map servers and implementation of the layers on the Wuudis platform, where all forest health status maps will be published to allow proactive management of their forest properties.

Forest damage (from e.g. storms, snow, pests and diseases) monitoring standardized procedures will be developed together with METSAK as well as easy-to-use RS-based tools and services for the damage monitoring needs of various stakeholders, and finally the data will be integrated with METSAK´s metsaan.fi eService. However, these activities are partially dependent on further funding through a “Spearhead  roject” with national funding support, managed by METSAK.

The pilot aims to develop a comprehensive and near real-time quantitative assessment of forest cover, forest aboveground carbon stock and carbon stock change over the project pilot area (Rangunkorpi cooperative forestry). This allows detecting and measuring damages, deforestation and forest degradation, which is a major cause of loss of biomass and carbon stores. The data collected will provide a comprehensive and near real-time quantitative assessment of forest vegetation indexes and monitoring spatial changes related to forest degradation and deforestation over the project pilot areas. A challenging aspect is the integration of numerous heterogeneous data sources into distributed systems. This is a prerequisite for genuinely exhaustive information systems for strategic management.

For easy integration of satellite maps and analysed (highlighted) theme maps, standard WMS or WMTS interfaces will be used. The Wuudis Service is using OpenLayers 3/4 as the mapping client library. For the phase I development Wuudis needs all the data provided in a ready to use format (for the end users), so no calculations need to be done in the Wuudis platform. Wuudis will just serve as a user interface for the end users and display specific important information provided by the Remote Sensing (RS) services. All the developed RS map layers should be available in the Wuudis web UI and in the Wuudis mobile app.

The main motivation for this pilot is:

• provide a useful tool on the Wuudis Service for accurate monitoring forest cover and forest damages caused by storms and insects for example.

The main KPIs of the pilot are:

• %Decrease in operational costs for performing the same contracting activities (through accurate site information and better management of resources) following the e-tools available/developed vs. what would be the revenue (per hour) following current practices based
  • Quantify %Decrease in operational costs for example for harvesting (contractor)
• %Increase customer satisfaction following the monitoring e-tools and services available/developed vs. what would be the satisfaction following forest asset monitoring practices based on forest owners present practicalities (forest management plan (10 years interval) on paper or in electronic form in own/authority IT systems)
  • Quantify %increase in satisfaction for example for forestry level reporting (forest owner)
• %decrease in costs following the monitoring tools available/developed for monitoring and reporting vs. what would be costs based on monitoring and reporting practices currently
  • Quantify %decrease in costs (authority and/or insurance company?)
• The amount of forest owners and other users as Wuudis Service users is now around 2700. The amount is expected to increase as follows: 5 000 in the end of 2017, 10 000 in the end of 2018 and 50 000 in the end of 2019.