PROJECTS DETAIL

Project Name:

FOREST DISTURBANCE INVENTORY USING REMOTE SENSING – (FoReS)

Project Manager: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Petar Dimitrov (SRTI-BAS)

Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Lachezar Filchev (SRTI-BAS)

As part of the efforts for sustainable management and protection of forest resources in recent years, increasing attention is paid to the study and documentation of natural disturbances in forests, their causes, scope and regime. The impact of various natural factors such as fires, insect pest attacks, tree diseases and extreme weather events is palpable and affects many Bulgarian forests. Thanks to modern Earth observation technologies, today we have the opportunity to receive systematic spatially explicit information about natural disturbances in the entire forest fund. The project FoReS - Forest disturbance inventory using Remote Sensing aims to demonstrates this potential by adapting and testing methods for creating standardized and verified cartographic information products, namely:

     1. Map of natural disturbances on the territory of the country

     2. Maps of the degree of damage for individual affected areas

     3. Maps of post-fire recovery processes for individual affected areas     

These products will be obtained periodically by analyzing images with a medium spatial resolution (10-20m) of the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites. They will provide an opportunity for a more detailed quantitative assessment of the scale and trends of the ongoing processes, and we hope that this will be useful for both forest management professionals and researchers interested in the long-term dynamics of forest ecosystems.

It is a two-year project, launched in April 2021. The project is implemented by the Remote Sensing & GIS department and the Aerospace Information department of Space Research and Technology Institute jointly with the Southwestern State Enterprise - Blagoevgrad and the Romanian company Forest Design SRL. The project is funded by the European Space Agency (ESA Contract 4000134290/21/NL/CBi).