Forests cover over 215 million ha in Europe, that is 33% of the surface, although unevenly distributed; 44% forests are public while 56% are privately owned by 7.8 million proprietors. 87% of the European forest areas follow a semi-natural exploitation pattern while 9% are plantations. Forestry has a significant contribution to EU economy: at least 3 million employees work in the forestry sector, generating a market value of round wood of more than 18,000 mEuro, 0.9% of the GDP. All these facts illustrate the complex reality behind the wood and forest sector.
MySustainableForest project has run from November 2017 to October 2020. Objectives were framed by key EU policies, namely the EU Forest Policy, the EU Innovation Policy and the EU Space Policy and its flagship EO programme Copernicus. In 2019, ambitious key EU publications and policies were launched such as the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for 2030; the Vision 2040 of the European forest-based sector; the Forest-based Industries 2050; the European Green Deal Strategy, and the European Digital Strategy. The results of MySustainableForest are also aligned with the Destination Earth initiative.
MySustainableForest goals pushed forward the use of remote sensing data across the silvicultural chain into the forest management and wood-industry realm. Deriving meaningful thematic information on forests and wood quality from satellites, LiDAR or sound waves is not trivial. MySustainableForest has faced challenging technological, commercial, societal and administrative objectives.
MySustainableForest analysed the forest sector End-User requirements with reference to EO technologies, to facilitate specific tasks during the silvicultural cycle and, eventually, to add value to wood market products. Six services have been generated relative to forest site and wood quality characterization, volume, biomass and CO2 stocking, forest health, ecosystem vulnerabilities and forestry accounting. Likewise, the said services gather 21 geoinformation products, each being an independent and a complete component of a service.
The innovation goals have proved to be double-fold: first, the technological implementation of the operational service and second the scientific quality of the products which will in turn make wood production and transformation more competitive. The innovation is stressed in the following components: (1) the web service platform architecture for processing products automatically from the various producers. (2) the refined product algorithms, ensemble in the processing module of the platform.
