The project
The management and conservation of forest ecosystems in Europe and worldwide is an indispensable element of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. Accurate and up-to-date information on forest health and carbon balance is therefore essential to assess the current state of forests, trigger appropriate countermeasures against forest loss and develop better management strategies. Advances in Earth Observation and artificial intelligence have paved the way for the automation of forest monitoring using time series of satellite data, including optical, radar and LiDAR measurements. However, forest maps produced by current approaches are still often limited to coarse resolutions and/or relatively small spatial areas. To overcome these limitations, the AI4Forest project brings together experts in artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, computer science, space remote sensing and climate change. AI4Forest is working to develop innovative AI methods for forest monitoring, as well as scalable AI methods to efficiently and cost-effectively process large amounts of data. The resulting techniques will facilitate the generation of detailed maps of key global forest variables at very high spatial and temporal resolution for the entire European continent and the world, including identification of tree species, mortality, and carbon losses and gains down to the level of individual trees.
