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

iForest: Biogeosciences and Forestry

article

Giovanni D’Amico¹  Elia Vangi¹  Saverio Francini¹  Francesca Giannetti¹  Antonino Nicolaci⁶  Davide Travaglini¹  Lorenzo Massai⁴  Yamuna Giambastiani⁴  Carlo Terranova⁸  Gherardo Chirici¹ 

[1] Dept. of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry, DAGRI, University of Florence;Dept. of Bioscience and Territory, DiBT, University of Molise;Dept. of Innovation in Biological, Agro-Food and Forest System, DIBAF, University of Tuscia;Bluebiloba startup Innovativa s.r.l.;ForTech, University of Florence joint laboratory;Dept. of Computer Engineering, Modeling, Electronics, and Systems Science, DIMES, University of Calabria;LAMMA Consortium - Environmental Modelling and Monitoring Laboratory for Sustainable Development;Geoportale Nazionale, Italian Ministry of the Environment

关键词: National Datasets;    Forest Inventory;    Forest Monitoring;    Forest Mask;    Airborne Laser Scanning;    LiDAR;   

DOI  :  10.3832/ifor3648-014

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Societa Italiana di Selvicoltura ed Ecologia Forestale (S I S E F)

【 摘 要 】

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 km2 (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.

【 授权许可】

Unknown