FRESh LIFE – Demonstrating Remote Sensing integration in sustainable forest management

In the context of Action B.5 “Upscaling project” we developed a Forest Information System (FIS) for an additional forest area in Tuscany: “Riserva Naturale Statale Biogenetica di Vallombrosa”. The experiences and results achieved during the activities in the other  three demonstration sites were the base to develop the Vallombrosa FIS.

The FIS was develop to support the revision of Forest Management Plan in Vallombrosa and to give to the students of forestry courses of University of Florence the opportunity to use FIS during their field courses.

The area covered by Vallombrosa FIS is 1000 ha and the spatial data related to Forest Indicators were generated using UAV photogrammetric data acquired by eBEE and the LiDAR data acquired by aircraft in 2015 by Tuscany Region.

Field data acquisition

Remote sensing data acquisition by ebee UAV

Screenshot by the Forest Information System on QGIS and, below, map of the growing stock for the Vallombrosa National Reserve

Last week in Curitiba (Brazil) Anna Barbati (University of Tuscia) presented the results of our project during the XXV IUFRO World Congress.

Here below some pictures from the session named “Innovative application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Forest Science and Management” during which she talked about “What UAV remote sensing can tell us about sustainability of forest
management at operational level: lessons learned from the EUfunded
FREShLIFE project”.

The presentation is available for download at this link —> DOWNLOAD

In these last phases of the project we are starting to work on the up-scaling of the results. In order to better understand how to maximize the impacts an analysis of the preferences of the subjects involved is fundamental.

At the link below a quick Q/A survey to have both a wide understanding of the benefit of the Fresh Life project products in your daily work and tips about how to improve their potential in the project results’ up-scaling.

https://forms.gle/ZQ7Y9af6UZkZD86X9

Thanks for your help!

This week we had an interesting training session organized by our partner Regione Molise in collaboration with the University of Molise and the University of Florence.

During the two days of training different stakeholder were guided trought the metodologies developed by the project from the field surveis to the elaboration of the data to create maps of the Sustainable Forest Management indicators.

Here below some photos of the days.

On the 7th and 8th of May we had the monitoring visit of the project in the demonstration site of Bosco Pennataro.

Here below some pictures of the days and the link at the Report For Policy Makers that was presented during the meeting.

REPORT FOR POLICY MAKERS –> pdf download

Here below the link to the paper “Influence of Scan Density on the Estimation of Single-Tree Attributes by Hand-Held Mobile Laser Scanning” funded by the LIFE program in the framework of our project.

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/10/3/277/htm