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L. Eysn, M. Hollaus, F. Berger:
"NEWFOR - Enhancing the wood supply chain within the alpine space - An insight in forest delineation, stratification of growing stock models and forest roads extraction based on LIDAR data";
Talk: ForestSAT 2014, Riva del Garda, Italy; 2014-11-04 - 2014-11-07.

The Forest in the alpine space can be linked to different ecological and economical functions in our society. For example many habitats and species are hosted by the forest which can be related to an ecological function. From an economic point of view forest in the alpine space represents a key resource within this mountainous environment. The valorization of this resource is often limited by accessibility constraints that prevent an efficient mapping, management, harvesting and transport of wood products. From an economical perspective, the production of renewable resources like timber and fuelwood has positive effects both at global scale, with climate change mitigation, and local scale with rural employment and the development of a regional value chain. Therefore the objective of preserving and improving the development of alpine forests is a point of public interest. However, managing forests in mountainous territories is a difficult task as topography and climate set strong constraints inside a complex socio-economical framework. In particular, a precise mapping of forest biomass characteristics and mobilization conditions (harvesting and accessibility) is a prerequisite for implementing an efficient supply chain for the wood industry. The available information is currently insufficient to provide, at reasonable costs, the required guarantees on the wood supply and on its sustainability. With recent developments in the remote sensing domain as for example enhanced sensor technologies and improved modelling tools, major improvements regarding the evaluation of the forest growing stock and accessibility are now possible. Upon this highly valuable information, decision-making tools are needed to optimize the investments in forest infrastructures required for a cost-effective wood supply while securing the sustainable management of forests.
The research project NEWFOR (NEW technologies for a better mountain FORest timber mobilization) (NEWFOR 2012) was established in 2011 for a period of three years. Fourteen institutions of the six countries within the alpine space aim at enhancing the wood supply chain within the alpine space to improve forest timber evaluation and mobilization using new remote sensing technologies and geographical information systems. One objective of the NEWFOR project is to evaluate and to optimize methods and workflows to locate the timber resource i.e. forest area or growing stock based on remote sensing data and to enhance the accessibility of the resource by i.e. efficiently accessing the resource using an up to date forest road network with automatic routing capabilities

Forest delineation; wood supply chain; growing stock; stem volume; alpine space; forest roads; forest management

http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/2.1.4820.7042