Climate change is an unprecedented challenge and significantly impacts the functioning of forest ecosystems and the services they provide. The climate change’s complex nature increases the uncertainty associated with predicting future forest ecosystem dynamics and requires an adaptive management approach. Therefore, forest managers need monitoring and analysis tools to assess the forest resources’ current conditions and their capacity to supply ecosystem services. Geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing are useful tools to quantify sustainable forest management (SFM) indicators to support the local decision making process.
SFM is widely recognized as a key objective of forestry policies and practices. To monitor, evaluate, and track progress toward SFM in Europe at a regional, national and international levels, six key criteria were adopted and measured through a suite of quantitative and qualitative Pan-European indicators of forest management.
The FRESh LIFE – Demonstrating Remote Sensing Integration in Sustainable Forest Management (LIFE14/IT000414) project aims to develop innovative methods to integrate forest inventory data collected in the field, with remote sensing information to estimate selected SFM indicators across space at the local scale. Within the project, high-resolution data were collected at three sites in central Italy using drones equipped with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and optical sensors. Automated and semi-automated mapping methods were used to spatially characterize the variables used to assess forest physiognomy and conditions at the forest management unit scale.

Above, we will go through the Fresh Life project products and we will submit to you a quick Q/A survey to have both a wide understanding of their benefit in your daily work and tips about how to improve their potential in the project results’ up-scaling.