Forest Monitoring (Environmental)

Prime Contractor
GMV (Spain)

Contact
Ana Sebastian Lopez - asebastian@gmv.com

Partners
VTT (Finland)

Users
ENCE (Spain), StoraEnso (Fi), Spanish Foresters Confederation COSE (Spain), Spanish Ministry of Environment, Biodiversity

Main Aims / Objectives
Demonstrate the value of EO for periodical inventories of wood supply for the national and import forestry market.

Main Services

Frequent (3-5 years) updates on the forest extent and above-ground biomass estimates.

These services exploit optical (Spot-5, MERIS) and radar (PALSAR, ASAR) data. The utility of observations by RapidEye and TerraSAR-X to the service is also going to be investigated.

The forestry market (in particular its pulp sector) requires regularly updated information on the availability of raw material. As availability of wood on the market is severely impacted by unpredictable forest fires and pests (e.g. pinewood nematode) the standard national forest inventories at a 10 years interval prove inadequate for the needs of the forestry industry. In order to plan their future market activities (e.g. import of timber) and to organize their operations the forestry industry requires periodically updates of clear-cut areas as well as biomass estimations of the remaining stands.

Service trials are being conducted in Spain and in Uruguay as an example for an external import market. The prospects of the service in the forestry markets sectors for timber as well as renewable energies are being assessed in cooperation with ENCE S.A. (Spain) an integral wood-transforming forest company. The benefit of the service to private forest owners is being further evaluated by the national Spanish Foresters Confederation COSE (Spain) and for biodiversity issues by the Spanish Ministry of Environment.