The German forest under climate stress - ForstEO project launched
The unusually severe heat and drought periods of the past five years have taken their toll on Germany's forests and fostered pest infestations. In the future, Earth observation will provide the forest sector with comprehensive data to detect forest damage and causes of damage at an early stage and to better inform forest management. On March 21, 2023, the International Day of Forests, the ForstEO project was launched for this purpose.
In the project, the EOC cooperates with the forest research institutes of the German federal states of Bavaria and Thuringia as well as with associated partners working for Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein. The area of responsibility of the cooperation partners from the federal states covers almost two thirds of the forest area of Germany and thus allows for investigations at regional and national scale.
The joint project coordinated by the EOC aims to derive qualitatively tested and robust information products from Earth observation data in order to expand and improve national forest monitoring. Time series from currently available Earth observation systems provide the appropriate spatial and temporal resolution for this purpose. These offer great potential, which will be further exploited with the help of ForstEO. Using machine learning methods, forest damage is recorded at short time intervals, assigned to specific causes of damage taking into account meteorological, forest climatic and other data, and examined in more detail with a focus on damage to deciduous forests.
ForstEO is funded over three years by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) and the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) within the framework of the Forest Climate Fund (Waldklimafonds). The Forest Climate Fund focuses on projects that help to adapt forest ecosystems to climate change.
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