BREATHE Technical Meeting 5 in Ankara
Another successful BREATHE - EO-based enhancement and verification of GHG inventories for forest and biomass - Technical Meeting 5 took place in Ankara, Türkiye in January 2024 co-organized by GeoVille (Lead) and its Turkish partner Globetech, with the participation of The University of Istanbul, The Turkish General Directorate of Forestry (OGM), and the three Austrian subcontractors: The Environment Agency Austria - Umweltbundesamt (UBA), SISTEMA and the University of Vienna.
GeoVille has developed a Sentinel-2-derived forest disturbance model at 10m spatial resolution based on artificial intelligence methods, at countrywide level for Austria and Türkiye, plus a fire delineation and severity model in Türkiye, for carbon accounting of Above-Ground-Biomass (AGB) annual losses and increments. SISTEMA produced in collaboration with NASA the AGB annual status maps at 30m spatial resolution over Austria and Türkiye for the period 2019-2022 using GEDI Spaceborne LiDAR, the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel (HLS) product, the Copernicus DEM and Sentinel-1 SAR data combined with field sample plots provided by Umweltdata GmbH for calibration/validation of the models. UBA is involved in capacity strengthening activities, supporting the user requirements for Türkiye and the enhancement of the CO2 emissions from biomass burning calculations. UNIVIE contributes in improving GHG flux estimates using the Lagrangian particle dispersion model FLEXPART for the dispersion of CO plumes resulting from selected wildfires. Further work on FLEXPART will focus on the integration of improved satellite data such as Sentinel-3 Hot Spot Fire Radiative Power and Sentinel-5P TROPOMI. Globetech is in charge of the overall IT System running on a European cloud infrastructure linked to a user dashboard customized to OGM’s needs, ensuring with GeoVille the scalability of services to the carbon compliance and voluntary markets. Midterm report of the last research year is scheduled at the end of March, with a foreseen end of the project by November 2024.
