As unbelievable as it sounds, we have come to the end of the ESA Forest Carbon Monitoring project. It has been a long and rewarding journey. Over the past four years, the project designed and implemented a toolset for remote sensing-based forest structure and biomass monitoring. The toolset offers a selection of statistically robust methods for forest monitoring and carbon accounting, aiming to meet the varying requirements of different stakeholders.
The 12 use case demonstrations implemented during the project, in cooperation with user partners, provided crucial understanding on the usability of the output products and on the accuracy levels that can be reached with varying datasets and methods in different conditions. Key findings from the demonstrations were reported in the recently published ATBD document. The findings highlight the essential benefits of EO-based monitoring approaches: most notably the frequency, scalability, transparency and cost-efficiency. However, it is also clear that in most cases EO data alone is not sufficient for legal or financial reporting. EO based methods need to be supported with modelling approaches and combined with representative reference datasets.
This blog series provides a good overview of the phases that we have gone through to reach this point. The project is now ending, but the life of the FCM toolset is only beginning! As you may have noticed, the website has been recently thoroughly updated to reflect the new situation. From now on, the website will serve as the main access point to find information on the FCM tools and on how to access them. If you are interested in using the tools, have a look at the updated FCM Toolset-page for instructions on how to proceed.
The FCM tools are already proving valuable for spatially explicit forest monitoring, carbon-market reporting, and disturbance detection. And we are committed to further development of the tools to achieve trust and wide acceptance of the FCM and other EO-based forest monitoring approaches through transparency and global collaboration. The ESA funded FCM project has provided a solid foundation on which we can build on, in collaboration with end-users, to improve the timeliness and completeness of forest information to better support current and future forestry stakeholders who need information on the status of the forest.
Thank you for following the project for all these years! We look forward to having you also following the future adventures of the FCM toolset.