Finnish Satellite Workshop (https://spaceworkshop.fi/) is one of the largest annual Earth observation events in Finland. The Forest Carbon Monitoring project is proud to be represented in this three-day event taking place in Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland, 18-20 January 2023.
Jukka Miettinen
Yet another major milestone in the Forest Carbon Monitoring project has been achieved, with the processing of the output products for the original seven demonstrations finished. We are proud to be able to share some highlights of the demonstration products here, although the work with the demonstrations will still continue in the form of accuracy assessment and user evaluation.
Country case studies linking the information from a national network of forest inventories and satellite data are needed to gain experience and build confidence on how forest-related greenhouse gas (GHG) monitoring and reporting can benefit from evolving space-based biomass products. In the Forest Carbon Monitoring project, we had the opportunity to investigate this topic in Peru with our user partner the Peruvian National Forest and Wildlife Service (SERFOR).
We have good news! It was recently agreed that the Forest Carbon Monitoring project will conduct an additional demonstration in Austria, thereby including the Alpine environments into our already versatile selection of environmental conditions within our demonstration areas.
Last week, the Forest Carbon Monitoring team participated in the 4th Carbon from Space Workshop, which brought together the Earth observation, in situ and Earth system science communities to interact and discuss the challenges in understanding the carbon cycle, focusing particularly on the terrestrial component.
The Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic, within the EU Presidency programme, organized a workshop entitled “Towards harmonised Forest Observation, Reporting and Data Collection Framework – are we there yet?” The workshop was held in the beautiful setting of Kutná Hora, a historic town which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage list, on 14-16 September 2022.
A recently published paper on semisupervised UNet deep learning for forest height mapping provides ideas and understanding for potential future development directions of the carbon monitoring platform.
As promised two weeks ago, the ‘Platform’-page of our website has now been updated with information on the methods and datasets to be used in the platform prototype demonstrations. Have a look at the updated page to get a better idea on what kind of methods and datasets will be used and what kind of prototype products can be expected from the demonstrations.
During the past six months we have been busy running hundreds of tests with different Earth observation (EO) data combinations and prediction algorithms in the seven testing sites in Europe and Peru. These tests were conducted to allow selection of optimal EO data and method combinations for the demonstrations to be implemented during the second year of the project.
The Forest Carbon Monitoring project is well represented in the ESA Living Planet Symposium 2022 taking place this week in Bonn, Germany.