Metla Project 821801

Foremms

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Duration: 2000-2002   Keywords: European-scale environmental monitoring, Forest health, Information system

Objectives

Project goal: Contribute to the Community's policy on development of sustainable use of natural resources.

Project objective: To develop and demonstrate an advanced forest environmental monitoring and management system prototype. The operational
version of the prototype must be able to monitor the entire Europe giving precise and coherent information on the environmental status and development
of the European forests. The prototype to be developed in the project will be demonstrated at three locations covering the three major European forest types
(northern boreal coniferous forest, continental temperate mixed forest and Mediterranean dry forests).

Detailed objectives can be found from FOREMMS website: http://www2.nr.no/foremms/

Results

The FOREMMS system prototype (Fig. 1) includes automatic stations that will monitor a range of weather and environmental parameters. Stations are
installed in the 3 forest test sites in Finland, Poland and Italy. The stations have been set up to measure a set of parameters once per hour to provide a
continuous record of the environmental conditions within the forest: wind speed, wind direction, air temperature, relative humidity, rainfall, solar radiation,
barometric pressure, soil temperature, soil moisture and carbon dioxide concentration. Each station has a range of sensors, a multi-channel data logger,
a GSM mobile phone modem, a solar charger or wind generator and a rechargeable battery.



The meteorological data transfer module allows FOREMMS system to retrieve and access data from meteorological data sources
(weather services or meteorological organisations and institutions or any other meteorological data service provider) through an Internet connection.
The most suitable data providers seem to be ECOMET and Weather Underground. The retrieved meteo data is stored in the FOREMMS database,
to be used for processing of other parameters (e.g. fire risk). The meteo data transfer module uses the file transfer protocol for retrieving specially
formatted files with updated values for the selected meteo parameters.

The database in FOREMMS is the "information turnpike" for all data producers and consumers. Standard relational technology is employed for
the descriptive data (metadata), while the multidimensional database middleware RasDaMan is deployed to enrich these structures with raster
data, such as large satellite images. RasDaMan is unique in the market as it can maintain databases of raster maps of any dimensionality,
unlimited size, and any kind of raster (pixel) type, including customer-defined structures.

The data retrieval side provides all the functionality of the system as seen by the end user. The user interface allows FOREMMS users to retrieve
information about the forest environment and display it as a table, a graph, a map or an animation. A web-based approach has been adopted,
as it permits a wide access to the data processed and stored by FOREMMS via the Internet, and allows users to make queries and visualise query results interactively.

A GIS based web map server enable the delivery of maps as images over the Internet, adding a "spatial dimension" to the user experience.
The web user interface is graphically oriented, OpenGIS compliant and offers a high level of flexibility in managing user request.

FOREMMS Partners



Co-ordinator:

NR: Norwegian research institute. Long experience in remote sensing, statistics and information technology. Will cover significant parts of the remote
sensing and data analysis related tasks in the project in addition to the project administration and co-ordination. Contact person: Rune Solberg

Principal Contractors:

ARTEC: Multidisciplinary group of Italian companies. Two of their companies within the IT sector will contribute to software development, data transfer,
visualization and report/map generation in the project. Contact person: Raffaele Rossi.

METLA: The Finnish Forest Research Institute (user partner) has a research station in Joensuu, which will be responsible for the boreal coniferous node.
The research station is actively doing research on nutrients. Contact persons: Leena Finér, Jukka Alm.

AUC: The Department of Forest Ecology at the Agricultural University of Cracow (user partner) is responsible for the continental, temperate, mixed forest
node just outside Cracow. The department is very active on research related to air-pollution effects on forest and applications of geomatics techniques.
Contact person: Piotr Wezyk

CNR-IBIMET: Is an Italian research institute (user partner) covering environmental analysis for the agricultural sector. Within the institute,
there is a group that, in the last 15 years, has dealt with the application of satellite remote sensing to vegetation monitoring.
The institute will cover the Mediterranean dry forest node. Contact person: Paolo Frosini.

HUT: The Laboratory of Space Technology at the Helsinki University is the largest remote sensing unit in Finland and one of the most famous in the world.
HUT will mainly cover research on airborne remote sensing and some high-resolution satellite data, including main responsibility for Level-1 software.
The laboratory will do the airborne data collection with its own aircraft. Contact person: Martti Hallikainen.

UAB: Technical University of Barcelona, Spain. Strong experience in processing-demanding algorithms. Will develop software for the PC field workstation.
Contact person: Tomàs Margalef.

Assistant Contractors:

LU-ESRI: British research institute with interests towards man-technology aspects. Will contribute to user-interface specification and has the overall responsibility for evaluation.
Contact person: Martin Maguire.

ELEINT: British company doing development and sale of automatic measurement stations for meteorological and environmental applications.
Will be responsible for delivery and integration of the automatic field stations in the project. Contact person: Will Perrott.

COMELTA: Spanish company for development and integration of electronics. Will modify portable PCs to be suitable for field workstations, including GPS.
Contact person: Francesc Cruz Cueva.

Project leader: Alm, Jukka
The Finnish Forest Research Institute, Joensuu Office, PL 68, FI-80101 JOENSUU, FINLAND
Phone: +358 29 532 3107
E-mail: jukka.alm@metla.fi

Other researchers: Finér, Leena, JO (2000), Piirainen, Sirpa, JO (2000-01)


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Updated 12.06.2012
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