Author: Tuomas Häme
A three-year Forest Flux Innovation Action project of the Horizon2020 program was successfully completed recently. The findings of the project will directly benefit our ongoing Forest Carbon Monitoring project.
Forest Flux developed a service chain to support sustainable forest management. The services provide up-to-date and reliable information on forest structure, primary productivity, carbon stocks, and their changes. In addition, forecasts for the development of these variables can be computed. The services are offered from the same process of data refinement. In this process, the outputs of the previous phase are inputs to the next phase. The earlier phase outputs (such as forest height, basal area and volume) are also products that are delivered to the users.
Forest Flux services were implemented on the scalable Forestry TEP cloud platform that enables integration of the Forest Flux products with the business processes of end users. The same platform is used also in our Forest Carbon Monitoring project. A full description of the products and processing system is presented in the recently published in Forest Flux Final Report.
Forest Flux services were developed for operational users in six countries from boreal to temperate and tropical zones. They are thus applicable for worldwide operational use. A commercial service entity for forest structural and carbon flux variables is available from Forest Flux. This enables frequent monitoring of forest resources and carbon for forest owners, timberland management companies, investors, the insurance sector, as well as governmental and intergovernmental bodies.
Some components of the services developed in the Forest Flux project are further developed and compared with other approaches in the Forest Carbon Monitoring project. The former project thereby directly supports the ongoing project by providing both scientific background as well as technical solutions to facilitate implementation of the testing and demonstration cases. In addition to the variety of forest monitoring approaches evaluated, another key difference between the projects is the geographic coverage of the outputs. While the Forest Flux primarily concentrated on local level demonstrations, the Forest Carbon Monitoring will include also national and European level demonstrations.
Forest Flux project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under grant agreement No 821860.