Piloting a national forest information platform in Italy

The objective of the service is to generate an on-line and publicly available information platform on forests based on the data provided by the Copernicus service to support private forest owners in implementing sustainable forest management activities.

The piloting on line service will downstream updated spatial information related to forest disturbances and carbon accumulation based on Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery, existing Copernicus Land Monitoring Services and local data integrated in a new piloting system based on an innovative artificial intelligence. The system will foster the user uptake in the forestry area that still have a limited knowledge of the potentialities offered by the Copernicus services. This is mainly because forest owners in Italy do not have resources for creating in-house application due to the limited dimension of their woodland properties.

The key users of the system include several target groups that will be involved in the initial design of the system specification, and later on in the development of the system: private forest owners, regional forest administrations.

All the target groups will get access to the information (A - Biomass map and B – forest disturbance map see below) through an on line web GIS interface where they will be able to navigate and, in case of skilled users (such as professional foresters, technicians in Regional administrations), to download the information. The three target groups were involved during the preparation of this proposal in order to take account of their specific needs but we will ensure their involvements during the whole project implementation to ensure that the platform will actually lead to increased use of Copernicus services. We will also take care of dissemination and promoting actions to foster the European outreach of the project in the framework of the FPCUP activities.

The project will be organised in the following phases

Phase 1 - Preparation of a forest biomass map (Product A). Sentinel-2 data will be used in conjunction with Copernicus Land Monitoring Services products (the high-resolution layer Forest Type and Tree Cover Density) integrated with the information collected in the field in the framework of the Italian National Forest Inventory to produce a wall-to-wall estimation of forest biomass.

Phase 2 - Preparation of a forest disturbance map (Product B). Time series analysis of Sentinel-2 data will be used to produce yearly maps of forest disturbances classified on the basis of disturbance type: forest loggings, forest fires and other disturbances (such as wind storm damages or pest diseases).

Phase 3 – Implementation of the on-line platform. Both the products from Phases 1 and 2 will be available on-line through the creation of an on-line platform to support the activities of the different target groups at multiple scale levels from local to national. The user interface and the functionalities will be developed on the basis of the user requirements needs acquired in specific meetings.

Phase 4 – Dissemination of the platform. In order to ensure that the national forest information platform will be used we will organise webinar and public events for presenting the functionalities of the platform in the framework of the activities of the FPCUP.

The main results are the implementation of an on-line downstreaming GIS service to access both the high-resolution forest biomass map and the forest disturbance map. In doing so we will involve a user community created for ensuring the exchange and involvement of potential end users in all the phases of the project from the design, to the implementation and finally to the dissemination. This will be achieved with the organisation of meetings and seminars and with the distribution of communications.