The first meeting of the SWIFTT project, which won the Horizon Europe competition in the Digital, Industry and Space direction and is dedicated to innovative technologies for satellite monitoring of diseased and damaged forests in accordance with the Green Deal, took place. The stage of signing the grant agreement is currently underway. The implementation of the project will begin on November 1, 2022.
The main goal
The SWIFTT consortium’s objective and ambition is to monitor forests health and give a holistic early warning of forest threats using AI-based on proprietary models specific for detecting forest threats. Our consortium is ideally positioned to build a Pan-European, monthly reporting SWIFTT platform of all forest health across Europe. Our solution aims to monitor, map and estimate the damage of the three major forest health threats: windthrow, insect outbreaks and wildfire, every month at a 10-metre resolution across Europe. This monitoring and mapping will be primarily based on Copernicus Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 data. Once completed, forest managers anywhere in Europe will be able to view SWIFTT maps detailing areas of windthrow damage and insect outbreaks, and fire risk, including volumes of forests at risk through our web and mobile apps. This detail will enable forest managers to deal with these threats proactively and efficiently perform resource allocation for timely intervention. The key benefit will be sustainable, effective, low-cost forest management in the wake of increasing forest threats. Europe will be better positioned to combat climate change and preserve biodiversity through healthier forests.
Consortium consists of the next partners
- Consortium Coordinator Wildsense company (France) has already completed the development of web and mobile apps on which various risk maps will be displayed. Wildsense has developed remote sensing models capable of detecting windthrow damage, tree health, and forest volumes.
- Academic research partner: Space Research Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the State Space Agency of Ukraine represents Ukraine in international space organizations and working groups. It is part of UN-SPIDER which aims at improving actions to reduce disaster risk or support disaster response operations through knowledge sharing and the strengthening of institutions in the use of space technologies.
- Tech Contributor University of Bari Aldo Moro (Italy) has an expertise in on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Its “Knowledge Discovery and Data Engineering” Laboratory is a leading centre of competence for the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques for the analysis of spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal data and data time series.
- Scientific Research Partner Institute for Information Processing (Germany) has expertise in wildfire modelling and is the second partner contributing to the research expertise and will take part in the research and development of the visual signal processing technology.
- Tech Contributor Timbtrack company (Belgium) is the provider of the most advanced tree measurement tool on the market.
- End-users from Germany, France and Latvia will take part in the testing and validation of the forest health monitoring models.
- Dissemination partner Da Vinci Labs (France) is responsible for reconciliation of technological innovation with sustainable development by creating physical spaces allowing all stakeholders (citizens, industrials, researchers, policy makers) to experiment with technologies that can respond to the major societal problems of our era (climate change, biodiversity loss, health, cybersecurity).