European Forest Monitoring Approaches

An assessment of forest biomass maps in Europe using harmonized national statistics and inventory plots

“…Even though Europe will not be covered by the upcoming ESA BIOMASS satellite ( Carreiras et al, 2017 ), new biomass maps with improved accuracy and higher spatial and temporal resolutions will be produced in the coming years thanks to better data acquired by dedicated satellite missions (e.g., the GEDI and NISAR missions) and larger availability of airborne lidar data ( Goetz et al, 2015 , Morton, 2016 ), improved modelling approaches ( Santoro et al, 2017 ) and new data fusion techniques ( Avitabile et al, 2016 , Goetz et al, 2015 ). Furthermore, time-series data recently acquired by the ESA Sentinel 1 and 2 missions and related products such as the Copernicus high resolution forest layers providing recent and detailed information on forest extents and properties ( Probek et al, 2014 ) will contribute to obtain improved and up-to-date biomass estimates. In this context, the role of the European NFIs will not decrease but instead it will become even more important because they will provide the key reference data to calibrate and assess the accuracy and reliability of the new biomass products.…”

An Enhanced Algorithm for Automatic Radiometric Harmonization of High-Resolution Optical Satellite Imagery Using Pseudoinvariant Features and Linear Regression

“…Consistent, accurate, reliable and up-to-date information on the state of forests in Europe is required by European countries for reporting and policy making but is also needed for several European and international forest-and environment-related policies, action plans and international agreements (Probeck et al, 2014). Since several years the information gathering in this context is complemented with remote sensing, which represents an adequate and accepted tool for collecting reproducible and reliable information on forest areas over a large spatial extent in a cost-efficient and objective way as shown by Seebach et al (2011).…”

“…Since several years the information gathering in this context is complemented with remote sensing, which represents an adequate and accepted tool for collecting reproducible and reliable information on forest areas over a large spatial extent in a cost-efficient and objective way as shown by Seebach et al (2011). In the frame of the European earth observation programme Copernicus an operational monitoring system based on remote sensing observations has been put in place for panEuropean mapping and regularly updating of a so-called HighResolution Forest Layer, comprising information on forest characteristics such as tree cover density (Probeck et al, 2014).…”