Real-time earth Observation of fOrest dynamics and biodiversiTy (ROOT)

Project description

In the course of accelerated climate change, provisioning of digital information on dynamics in forests plays a key role for climate change-appropriate and sustainable forest management.

Up-to-date data on forest dynamics and their consequences for biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and forest management are essential to both create broad societal awareness of the consequences of global change and enable decision makers at all levels to make evidence-based decisions and act in a timely manner.

The high spatial and temporal dynamics in the context of global change in forests currently pose enormous challenges to the regulatory structures to make evidence-based decisions. Problematic for a more efficient activity of societal decision-making is the uncertainty of what consequences for biodiversity, climate change mitigation, timber production and recreation the new dynamics in forests actually have. The core problem lies in the high spatial and temporal variation of all target variables. Remote sensing and digitization have already been identified as a potential solution in this context, especially for forests.

ROOT aims to develop a geoinformation portal that can provide timely and targeted information on forest dynamics, local damage events, and biodiversity changes based on satellite data for the entire Bavaria region.