While waiting for the finalization of the plans for the project extension, we would like to highlight some key developments that took place since the end of the main phase of the Forest Carbon Monitoring (FCM) project. The project was highlighted in several occasions in different types of events and media.
Jukka Miettinen
38 posts
After a longer than expected hiatus, it is now confirmed that we will get a further 18 months of funding from ESA to continue the work on the Forest Carbon Platform development. This allows us to focus on the topics that require further development and demonstrate the functionality of the improved approaches on practical use cases designed to meet specific user needs.
As unbelievable as it sounds, two years have passed since the Forest Carbon Monitoring started. This means that we are reaching the end of the current project. The project set out to implement a prototype of an operational remote sensing-based monitoring platform offering a cloud processing system for forest biomass and carbon monitoring. The platform...
Good news! The Forest Carbon Monitoring prototype product portal has been officially launched. Through this portal you can view and download all the prototype products that have been produced with openly available datasets. You can find more information on the specifications of the demonstrations at the ‘Demonstrations’ page.
Another major milestone has been reached in the project, with all the eight main demonstrations successfully concluded. Altogether, 79 prototype map products were delivered to the users in the demonstrations, including forest structure variables, biomass and growth variables and change detection products.
The long-awaited Forest Carbon Monitoring User Workshop was finally held in sunny Espoo, Finland, on the 1-2 March 2023. This was the culmination point of the cooperation with our user partners, who have been supporting the project from the very beginning.
A workshop entitled “Towards harmonised forest monitoring and reporting for the EU” was organized in context of the Swedish Presidency on 1-2 February 2023 in Uppsala, Sweden. This workshop was a a follow-up to the workshop held in Kutná Hora in September 2022 during the Czech EU Council Presidency, to build on the outcomes of that meeting.
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.
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).