Project description
Why forest monitoring matters
Forests are important for our health and wellbeing and has many functions, including biodiversity protection, climate change mitigation, and wood production. Forest monitoring is required to obtain information that is needed to manage forests in a sustainable way. The EU-funded PathFinder project aims to ease this process by going beyond the state-of-art to make the most efficient use of field and remotely sensed data. Its aim is to create high-resolution maps and to precisely estimate forest attributes. Overall, forest monitoring will prove beneficial for decision-making and policy formulation at the regional, national and European levels.
Objective
Precise information on the current status of forests is required to forecast forest management effects which allows informed policy decisions. To inform and support the implementation of these policy objectives, PathFinder will develop and demonstrate an innovative integrated forest monitoring and pathway assessment system. This system, for the first time, will allow a consistent EU greenhouse gas reporting of the LULUCF sector, but, at the same time combine such monitoring capability with advanced pathway assessment to help plan the essential policy and implementation steps towards achieving the policy targets. The continuous monitoring of forests facilitates controlling of target achievement and possibly adjustment of pathways.
PathFinder goes beyond the state-of-art by the most efficient, combined use of field and remotely sensed data for high-resolution mapping and precisely estimating forest attributes. The cooperation of the largest forest monitoring organizations operating in the EU, i.e. national forest inventories (NFIs) and the network installed under ICP Forests, provides a rich data base of harmonized ground truth information which will be complemented by an innovative field survey of consistently assessed field monitoring sites. Advanced measurement devices will provide an audio-visual digital twin including genetic properties of the consistently monitored forest for maximum transparency and interoperability of new data. The analysis of combined databases will improve our understanding of fluxes among C pools.
The precise forest information of the monitoring system will feed into a new scenario framework that forecasts future forest scenarios and outcomes of forest management alternatives. The scenarios facilitate trade-off analysis of forest ES and are potential alleys in the pathway assessment. The pathway assessment is a co-creation activity in which novel monitoring and scenario studies are integrated with EU-level stakeholder visions and knowledge
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
1430 Aas
Norway
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Participants (19)
79098 Freiburg
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94160 Saint Mande
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1081 HV Amsterdam
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38116 Braunschweig
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10450 Jastrebarsko
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00790 Helsinki
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1131 Wien
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1000 Ljubljana
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250 01 Brandýs Nad Labem
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02150 Espoo
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28006 Madrid
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0349 Oslo
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37073 Gottingen
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00014 Helsingin Yliopisto
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T12 Cork
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
1000 Bruxelles / Brussel
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1040 Bruxelles / Brussel
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33610 Cestas
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00560 Helsinki
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Partners (4)
8903 Birmensdorf
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BS8 1QU Bristol
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1049 Bruxelles / Brussel
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1050 Copenhagen K
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