ForestPulse

Development of a public Copernicus service to create consistent and regionalizable tree species, vitality and structure information for Germany's forest areas

Project lead: JProf. Dr. David Frantz, Geoinformatics - Spatial Data Science

ForestPulse aims to make comprehensive geodata products accessible to a wide range of users in the four thematic fields of forest area, tree species distribution, vitality, and forest structure. These products will be based on the nationwide Sentinel-2 archive from the Copernicus program and the aircraft-based laser scanning data available nationwide from the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy. The goal is to provide these data long-term, free of charge, and customizable. In the process, barriers to permanent integration into operational processes are to be overcome by implementing the generation of forest information layers as a publicly available service. To achieve this, the extensive current capabilities of cloud processing and the high availability of Sentinel-2 time series, along with high-resolution laser scanning data, are combined with the latest methods of artificial intelligence. One of the key conceptual innovations of the service is to move away from the mere provision of pre-processed, static products towards enabling active user control for the generation of customized results. This will be possible through a web application, allowing users to actively invoke services to create data products, define specific processing areas, and provide their own local reference data in addition to the nationwide reference data typically used in the service, in order to optimize the accuracy of the results concerning local conditions. An important methodological innovation of ForestPulse is the spatial, temporal, and thematic alignment (consistency) of the information layers. The multidimensional consistency of the information layers, combined with customization and data access options, enables a wide range of evaluation possibilities and long-term integration into work processes.

Funding agency: BMDV (Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport)

Funding sum (Trier University): 619.881,96 €

Project term: 01.01.2025-31.12.2027

Project partners: 

• Thünen-Institut für Waldökosysteme
• Landesforsten Rheinland-Pfalz
• Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaft und Kunst (HAWK)
• Nordwestdeutsche Forstliche Versuchsanstalt
• Forstliche Versuchs- und Forschungsanstalt Baden-Württemberg