LIFE + DEMORGEST

Inventory and diagnosis LiDAR technology areas strategic to prevent forest fires (ZPM) in the Southern Catalonia

Creaf leader

DEMORGEST LIFE + project has as main objective to reduce the vulnerability of Catalan forests to large wildfires (GIF) and the adoption by foresters of ORGEST, new multifunctional forestry models aim at prevent GIF, but also considering productivity and other goods and services of forest.

CREAF collaboration project focuses on tuning a standard methodology for the characterization of the horizontal and vertical forest layers using LiDAR technology (LIght Detection And Ranging) at stand and landscape level. Through this technology we will obtain high resolution maps of the structure of vegetation that will determine very precisely the areas with higher risk of fire-crown spreading and thus determine the areas where priority action is needed to reduce the fuel load.

The main actions to be carried out are:

Photo-interpretation and processing of information of low resolution LiDAR (LiDARCAT) to characterize the vertical and horizontal structure of vegetation at landscape and stand level.
Conduct a forest Inventory sample plots to obtain ground-truth information at stand and landscape level and equations based on standard metrics based on LiDARCAT information.
Establishment of a standard methodology of LIDAR information to be used as a reference for: i) the requirements of forest management at large scale; ii) the detection of priority areas where prevention actions are needed to reduce wildfire risc.
Obtain new LiDAR metrics from high-resolution LiDAR information allowing to describe the vertical and horizontal structure of vegetation, especially ladder fuel.