CEURDIST

CEURDIST - Estimating forest disturbance area and trends for Central Europe using remote sensing data

Funding and duration:

European Forest Institute | 2024-2027

Summary:

Europe’s forests constitute the main carbon sink of the European Union (EU), but increasing disturbances have raised concerns about their future climate change mitigation potential. Understanding how changing forest disturbances impact Europe’s forest carbon pools requires rigorous monitoring, but monitoring is difficult as existing datasets were not designed to estimate disturbance area and trends.

The CEURDIST project aims to overcome this problem by:

updating and harmonizing existing databases from the literature,
expanding existing databases to increase sampling densities using novel semi-automatic interpretation tools
and ultimately estimating disturbance area and trends from the database for Central Europe.

The project will yield one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date databases on forest disturbance in Europe, covering 40 years from 1985 to 2023. Furthermore, we will provide a workflow for rapidly updating the disturbance database into the future, as well as robust estimates of disturbance area and trends for Central Europe at national and aggregated levels. As such, the project compiles an exhaustive open-access European forest disturbance reference dataset contributing to the overall aim of the FORWARDS project by improving our knowledge on the integration of remote sensing-derived maps and reference data for the statistically rigorous estimation of forest disturbance area.