Pilot study on the Use of Satellite Data for Regional Forest Condition Surveys

This report constitutes the final report of the project 'Pilot study on the Use of Satellite Data for Regional Forest Condition Surveys', financed by the European Commission, DGVI Agriculture, by the Swedish Board of Forestry and the Swedish Environment Protection Agency. The survey has been conducted within the period 1 January 1996 to 30 November 1997. The Swedish County Board of Forestry in Halland has supplied reference data for the survey in Halland, consisting of plot data from an air photo based survey of spruce defoliation. For the survey in Västernorrland, the forest companies MoDo and SCA provided digital forest maps enabling us to expand the survey area from an earlier project, and thus facilitating the analysis of cost-effectiveness for a larger area. Sam Ekstrand is head of the section for Geographic information technique at the Swedish Environmental Research Institute, IVL, and has a Ph.D. in the research field of satellite based monitoring of forest health. Christian Hansen is a Land Surveyor specialized on monitoring of forest conditions with satellite and airborne data, at the GIT section, IVL