On January 21st-22nd 2021, MySustainableForest partners are taking part in the Seminar on Bark Beetle Damage organised by SCERIN. The South, Central and Eastern European Regional Information Network (SCERIN) is one of the regional networks for Global Observation of Forest and Land-use Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD). The seminar will be part of the GOFC-GOLD virtual networking activities and will be hosted by START, a core international partner of the United States Global Change Research Program that works closely with universities and research institutes, United Nations agencies, governments and non-governmental organizations.

Among other challenges, MySustainableForest seeks solutions to bark beetle damage which leads to important economic and environmental losses in Central-Eastern Europe, were the forestry sector plays a key role. This project has demonstrated how remote sensing-based solutions allow monitoring and measuring forest health losses due to biotic disturbances while supporting management routines to forest owners and administrators.

The seminar is organized in 10 sessions on 2 consecutive days. Day 1 shall review the bark beetle damage status in SCERIN countries. Our partner Ivan Pilas from CFRI will present the bark beetle damage status in Croatian forests, focusing on the assessment and monitoring of pest outbreaks. Day 2 consists in an Expert Talks forum on bark beetle damage detection and monitoring using satellite, field and UAV data. Ángel Fernández Carrillo from GMV, will present the use of Sentinel-2 data for bark beetle detection, highlighting the development and results of GMV’s biotic damage product over a forest site near Brno (Czech Republic) affected by this pest. GMV will give an overview of the main remote sensing approaches to this topic and show possible Artificial Intelligence applications that might improve the current state of the art in the near future. Some results of the study were published last October in a peer-reviewed paper entitled “Monitoring Bark Beetle Forest Damage in Central Europe. A Remote Sensing Approach Validated with Field Data” of Remote Sensing journal with our Czech partners from the Mendel University in Brno.