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.
Innovative mapping methods and statistical estimation approaches will be implemented, not forgetting the introduction of additional EO datasets into the process. The underlying platform technology will also be improved, and the tools will be made platform agnostic, allowing easier implementation and use of the tools on different platforms.
We will have a renewed consortium and users, including both old and new partners. This renewed set-up of partners and users will allow us to focus on five use case demonstrations, each of them having their own special thematic development area. Two of the demonstrations will highlight regional level use cases in Europe, while two will focus on Tropical carbon monitoring. In addition, the European wide use case will continue, creating a time series of biomass maps.
In the coming weeks, we will update the web pages to reflect the current situation. As soon as the plans have been finalized, we will also publish a broader blog post on the goals of the project extension with more information on the new use case demonstrations to be conducted.
It feels good to be back working on the Forest Carbon Platform again. We are looking forward to providing more detailed information on our plans within the coming weeks.