The objective of the project is to develop and demonstrate a system and tools for trans-boundary environmental monitoring and management of forests in Europe. The system can be operated for monitoring at a regional, national or European level. It includes innovative approaches for retrieval of forest environmental variables from remote sensing data. The project will develop and demonstrate the system through a mini-network including three European countries spanning the main forest diversity in Europe. In the future, the solution should develop into a distributed monitoring system for the whole Europe. The whole-European network will contribute to a development towards a coherent international monitoring and management.

 

The Forest Environmental Monitoring and Management System (FOREMMS) project is carried out by 11 partners from eight European countries. The Commission of European Communities supports the project, which is coordinated by the Norwegian Computing Center on behalf of the international team. The project was initiated in 2000 by carrying out a survey to identify user needs for the FOREMMS system. The project decided to focus on environmental forest monitoring for public management and the citizen. The project has then been through a system design phase and is currently within the system development phase. This includes development of remote sensing methodology and the IT components of the system. The system will be demonstrated in the summer of 2002.