Forests are essential to life on Earth. They provide habitats for thousands of creatures and combat climate change through carbon sequestration. However, our forests are threatened by insect outbreaks, fires, and windthrows. Notably, insect outbreaks are one of the leading causes of forest loss globally, destroying 85M ha of forest worth €15B annually. At the same time, wildfires destroy 400M ha annually on a global scale, according to the European Space Agency. The wind is also a significant forest disturbance agent in the temperate forests of France, Germany, and most of Europe. Climate change affects forests, causing insects to breed more frequently. It also provides more dry fuel for global wildfires. The dry conditions increase the length of the fire season and the size of areas affected by the fire. In addition, both the frequency and the severity of large storms causing windthrow can be attributed to climate change. As a result, countless habitats are lost, and CO2 sequestered yearly decreases by over 4850M tons. Our solution, SWIFTT, will provide a scientifically sound and technically feasible way to help monitor and manage forest risks: windthrow, insect outbreaks, and forest fires. SWIFTT will enable forest managers to adapt to climate change with affordable, simple and effective remote sensing tools backed up by powerful machine learning models. Our solution will offer a monthly health monitoring service using Copernicus satellite imagery to detect and map the various risks to which forests and their managers are exposed. Early threat detection aids timely intervention. SWIFTT will be tested in real conditions by several end-users from the forest industry across Europe.

The E-SHAPE proposal is driven by the need to develop operational EO services with and for the users and to create a conducive environment whereby the strengths of Europe are exploited towards addressing societal challenges, fostering entrepreneurship and supporting sustainable development. The proposal objectives are 1) to develop operational EO services with and for users active in key societal sectors; 2) to demonstrate the benefits of the EO pilots through the coordinated downstream exploitation of EO data and the utilization of existing EO resources; 3) to promote the uptake of pilots at national and international scale, across vertical markets (private and public) and amongst key user communities; 4) to enable the long-term sustainability of the numerous pilots, their penetration in public and private markets and support their upscaling; 5) to increase uptake by raising awareness on the solutions developed through tailored and well-targeted communication, dissemination and outreach activities. The proposal aims at setting-up and promoting a sustainable organization dedicated to users’ uptake of European EO resources, building on Copernicus and GEOSS through the development of co-design pilots (i.e. application-oriented products, services or solutions) built on a user-centric approach and delivering economic, social and policy value to European citizens. It has also the ambition through the development of 27 pilots organized in 7 showcases to deliver information that will also contribute to the three GEO engagements (SDGs, Paris Agreement and Sendai Framework).

The European Commission proposed a Regulation on a monitoring framework for resilient European forests in November 2023. It builds on Copernicus as well as existing national data and shall offer better information for decision making and policy implementation across Member States. The intended monitoring system will be comprehensive and reduce existing knowledge gaps through scattered, incomplete, and outdated data on EU forests. Besides the collection of better data for decision making and policy implementation, the proposed law will create business opportunities not only for the growing Copernicus and EO monitoring industry but also to forest owners for marketing their ecosystem services, such as carbon removals. FUTUREFOR addresses key challenges deriving from the proposed law aiming at providing accurate and timely forest data for Europe. The project will closely liaise with Copernicus Entrusted Entities and key national stakeholders to assess the deriving needs from the Regulation together. The project will also support Ukraine adopting EU forest legislation, on its way becoming an EU member in the future. Based on our experiences in forest monitoring, Copernicus, AI and big data analysis the FUTUREFOR project will carry out research and innovation to establish the needed knowledge and propose products and workflows to explore the feasibility and limitations of innovative new and improved existing Copernicus-based datasets. The project will build on operational services that members of the consortium already provide and experiences from earlier H2020 and Horizon European projects. FUTUREFOR will also investigate innovative aerial platforms collecting sensor and image data from the stratosphere. Finally, three commercial business applications will be developed to demonstrate the business opportunities evolving from open Copernicus- and complementing forest data.