Objectives of the service
Private forests cover more than 12.5 million hectares in mainland France and belong to more than three million owners. Droughts, heatwaves and pests are weakening the stands, yet most owners and managers only know the state of their forest through field inventories carried out every 10 to 20 years, which are costly and not done everywhere. Between two inventories, decisions on thinning, harvesting, sanitary cuts or replanting are taken with large uncertainties.
The GFM KickStart assessed a service that fills this gap with satellite data. For any forest parcel, the service provides annual forest height and volume since 2016, health alerts and clear-cut detection. The maps are pre-computed over the whole country, so users get the information instantly, without providing field data. Owners and small managers access it on a web platform with online payment per hectare, while cooperatives receive it as a data stream in their own mapping tools.
Users and their needs
The project targeted the private forest sector in France. Three forestry cooperatives, together managing about 700,000 took part through detailed questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Private owner-managers answered an online survey. The users expressed the following needs:
- Follow growth and regeneration between two inventories
- Follow the standing volume and know when a stand is worth a sale and a precise measurement
- Detect dieback early and assess stands quickly after heatwaves, droughts, fires or storms
- Proven and stable accuracy, about 1 to 2 m for height depending on stand height, below 20% for volume
- Data delivered in their own GIS for large organisations, a simple self-service platform with online payment for smaller users.
The main challenge is accuracy, because users have been disappointed by previous offers and judge a service on evidence.
Service/ system concept
The service delivers four families of indicators for any forest area in mainland France: annual forest height, annual volume trends, a health anomaly indicator, and continuous clear-cut detection.
Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series are pre-processed, enhanced by super-resolution and converted into indicators by AI models calibrated on the national airborne LiDAR coverage. The maps are produced on cloud servers for the whole country and stored with their accuracy information. A single API controls access to the data. Owners and small managers select their parcels on a web platform, pay online per hectare and download statistics and reports. Cooperatives and experts receive the same products as map streams and through the API in their own GIS, with automatic health alerts on their perimeters.
Space Added Value
The service relies on the Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical satellites, whose data are free, frequent and cover the whole country. Field inventories are accurate but are costly. Drones and terrestrial laser scanning give detailed snapshots of a site, and airborne LiDAR campaigns give a precise national picture only every few years. Only satellites provide a monthly health signal over all private forests and annual updates of height and volume between two LiDAR campaigns, at a cost of a few euros per hectare. Radar adds observations under cloud cover.
Airborne LiDAR is used to calibrate the satellite models, so users do not need to supply field data. Super-resolution brings Sentinel-2 to a 2.5 m pixel, fine enough to read irregular stands inside a parcel. The satellite service does not replace ground measurement when a stand is sold, but it shows where and when such measurements are worth doing.
Current Status
The KickStart was completed in October 2026. The project:
- Collected the needs of three forestry cooperatives and a national body for forests management through questionnaires and interviews, and of private owners through an online survey
- Defined the user and system requirements and the service architecture, and designed the user-interface mock-ups
- Built a two-channel business model and a bottom-up estimate of about 150,000 hectares under service by 2030.
The service was judged technically feasible and economically viable.
Prime Contractor(s)
