Are we ready for a National Forest Information System? State of the art of forest maps and airborne laser scanning data availability in Italy

Abstract

Biogeosciences and Forestry Biogeosciences and Forestry Are we ready for a National Forest Information System? State of the art of forest maps and airborne laser scanning data availability in Italy Giovanni D'Amico (1) , Elia Vangi (1-2) , Saverio Francini (1-2-3) , Francesca Giannetti (1-4-5) , Antonino Nicolaci (6) , Davide Travaglini (1) , Lorenzo Massai (4-5) , Yamuna Giambastiani (4-5-7) , Carlo Terranova (8) , Gherardo Chirici (1-5) Forest planning, forest management, and forest policy require updated, reliable, and harmonized spatial datasets. In Italy a national geographic Forest Information System (FIS) designed to store and facilitate the access and analysis of spatial datasets is still missing. Among the different information layers which are useful to start populating a FIS, two are essential for their multiple use in the assessment of forest resources: (i) forest mapping, and (ii) data from Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS). Both layers are not available wall-to-wall for Italy, though different local sources of information potentially useful for their implementation already exist. The objectives of this work were to: (i) review forest maps and ALS data availability in Italy; (ii) develop for the first time a high resolution forest mask of Italy which was validated against the official statistics of the Italian National Forest Inventory; (iii) develop the first mosaic of all the main ALS data available in Italy producing a consistent Canopy Height Model (CHM). An on-line geographic FIS with free access to both layers from (ii) and (iii) was developed for demonstration purposes. The total area of forest and other wooded lands computed from the forest mask was 102,608.82 km 2 (34% of the Italian territory), i.e., 1.9% less than the NFI benchmark estimate. This map is currently the best wall-to-wall forest mask available for Italy. We showed that only the 63% of the Italian territory (the 60% of the forest area) is covered by ALS data. These results highlight the urgent need for a national strategy to complete the availability of forest data in Italy.

Estimating VAIA Windstorm Damaged Forest Area in Italy Using Time Series Sentinel-2 Imagery and Continuous Change Detection Algorithms

“…The study area coincides with the Italian area hits by the VAIA windstorm as reported by Chirici et al (2018) [47] in the following Regions of Italy: Trentino Alto Adige, Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lombardia, Piemonte, and Valle d'Aosta (Figure 1), for a total of 67,000 km 2 covered by forest for 144,651.1 ha following the FAO forest definition [48,49]. The VAIA storm hit the area in the night between 28 and 29 October 2018 with winds up to 200 km/h [45].…”

“…), however some damages were reported also in broadleaves forests such as in beech stands (Fagus sylvatica L.) [48]. Preliminary field recognition and manual photointerpretation of satellite data showed that a total of 42.525 ha of forests were damaged by the storm [47,49]. The minimum mapping units used to delineate damaged area was 2000 m 2 and the areas were considered damaged if at least 50% trees fallen.…”

“…The pixels in the images of the collection covered by clouds and cloud shadows were masked using the algorithm Fmask implemented in GEE [50]. Moreover, to reduce the area of the analysis just to forest areas, according to the FAO definition, we excluded the pixels of each images outside the forests using the high resolution forest masks [49].…”

Integrating GEDI and Landsat: Spaceborne Lidar and Four Decades of Optical Imagery for the Analysis of Forest Disturbances and Biomass Changes in Italy

“…The study was conducted in the approximately 11 million hectares of Italian forest land, as defined by the last national forest mask (Figure 1) [40,41]. A remarkable variability of vegetation characterizes the Italian peninsula due to a wide diversity of geographical and morphological conditions.…”

Historical GIS as a Tool for Monitoring, Preserving and Planning Forest Landscape: A Case Study in a Mediterranean Region

“…To create a historical GIS, however, in addition to a thorough bibliographic work, it is necessary to use techniques that allow for minimizing cartographic errors inherent in the historical cartography used [62]. New open-source applications and the interoperability of QGIS with other tools provide methodologies of semiautomatic and manual georeferencing and digitization that speed the work without losing accuracy.…”