Assesscarbon successfully demonstrated large area forest biomass and carbon mapping in Forestry TEP

Over the past year, we have been following the progress of the Assesscarbon project in a series of blog posts. The project, which was coordinated by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and funded by European Space Agency (ESA), aimed to demonstrate at a pre-operational level an approach for large area forest biomass and carbon monitoring in Forestry TEP. The project used Sentinel-2 composite image mosaic (by Terramonitor) and field measurement plots as inputs. Models were calculated for forest structural forest variable (by VTT) and primary production (by University of Helsinki) estimation. An automated processing pipeline was developed and implemented into Forest TEP (by VTT and Simosol).

The functionality of the forest biomass and carbon monitoring approach was successfully demonstrated by creating four output products covering Finland and the Russian boreal forests until the Ural Mountains. The output products covered 214 Sentinel-2 grid tiles and had 10 m spatial resolution. The Growing Stock Volume (GSV) map was presented already in our previous blog post. Here we present additionally three primary production layers including Gross Primary Production (GPP), Net Primary Production (NPP) and Stem Volume Increment (SVI). All of the four output layers show highly detailed and viable results from fine scale details to regional forest biomass and carbon flux distribution. All of the output maps can be viewed in full resolution here.

Overall, the project demonstrated the suitability of the Forestry TEP platform and the chosen methodological approaches for monitoring forest biomass and carbon sequestration in a scalable fashion. The system allows annual reporting from forest stand level to regional analyses with consistent methodology and results. With the implementation and demonstration of the approach successfully carried out in the Forestry TEP platform, the Assesscarbon project has laid a foundation for development of operational large area forest biomass and carbon monitoring services. They will support forestry stakeholders to respond to the increasing amount of regulative and voluntary reporting requirements related to forest biomass and carbon, bio-economy and climate change. Forestry TEP is proud to be able to offer services that help forestry stakeholders in their climate change mitigation and sustainability efforts.