Project description
Studying small-scale disturbances’ impact on European forests
Forests are experiencing stress due to climate-induced disruptions such as wildfires, droughts, storms and insect outbreaks, as well as land use pressures like deforestation, intensive forestry and the expansion of plantations. In the past, satellites like MODIS and Landsat had limited resolution, which made assessing disturbances in European forests a challenging task. However, the new high-resolution PlanetScope satellite constellation provides daily imagery, allowing for the detailed mapping of small-scale disturbances, down to individual trees. The MSCA-funded PARDI project investigates the impact of these disruptions on European forests. This technology will provide more accurate information about changes in forest productivity and biomass. It will also enable a comprehensive evaluation of the vulnerability of European forests to the effects of climate change.
Objective
Forests account for most of the global terrestrial carbon sink. Yet, they are exposed to an increasing stress from climate-induced disturbances (wild fires, droughts, storms, insect outbreaks) and land-use pressure (deforestation, intensive forestry, expansion of plantations ). Due to the coarse resolution of the the past generation of satellites (MODIS, Landsat), the severity, extent and the timing of these disturbances are not accurately assessed across the European continent, which limits our understanding of forest resistance and recovery in the face of climate extremes, compound events and human-induced disturbances. A new generation of satellite constellation (PlanetScope) providing very high resolution imagery at 3 meters resolution daily has been launched in 2016, and reached full capacity to map small scale disturbances down to tree level. The PARDI (PARtial DIsturbances) project will take advantage of this unique dataset and make a giant leap to quantify and understand the impact of disturbances on the mortality, biomass, carbon loss and recovery of European forests. PARDI will go beyond the state of the art by providing an unprecedented spatial resolution (from 30 m in the most recent literature to 3 m in this project), thus reducing the uncertainty on productivity and biomass changes. The outcomes of PARDI will help to assess the sensitivity of European forests to climate change, and the vulnerability of key ecosystem services such as carbon sinks and wood production.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- humanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studieshistory of literature
- agricultural sciencesagricultural biotechnologybiomass
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesforestry
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
1165 Kobenhavn
Denmark