LTER Austria Secures Resilience of European Forests through the FORWARDS Project

The Zöbelboden Site (LTER Austria) has won a call for proposals by the FORWARDS project - The ForestWard Observatory to secure resilience of European Forests.

The ForestWard Observatory is a prototype designed to monitor and assess the impact of the climate crisis on European forest ecosystems in order to enable rapid decision-making for forest management. The Zöbelboden was selected to become a supersite. 'Supersites' are highly equipped forest monitoring sites (e.g. ICP Forests level II plots) in which multiple information layers are measured on the ground, with proximate sensing for capturing canopy dynamics as well as water and carbon cycling with high temporal resolution, and with near-real-time data delivery for better integration with RS time series. Together with less-equipped surrounding sites (e.g. ICP Forests Level I sites), such 'supersites' represent a given biographical region and enable FORWARDS' aim of linking ground-based assessments of trees and forests with information from satellite-based remote sensing. 

At Zöbelboden, the existing measurements will be scaled with standardised, near real-time data on water and carbon cycles and with remote sensing information. They are getting new measuring instruments (point dendrometers) to evaluate the ecophysiological processes of the trees and will start next summer with our partners from E.C.O. Terrestrial Laser Scans (TLS) and a drone flight (multispectral imaging), as well as a chemical analysis of the photosynthetic pigments.

The Swiss colleagues in FORWARDS are already demonstrating how drought stress in forests can be predicted using AI, similar to weather forecasting. Check out the TreeNet website for more info.