Objectives of the service
The Climate Smart Forestry project addresses the increasing need for frequent data-driven forest management under changing climate conditions. Forest managers face challenges in tracking forest growth, anticipating risks from extreme weather, and adapting to long-term climate shifts.
The project delivers an integrated digital platform, ForestHQ, that integrates IoT sensor data, satellite imagery, and climate information into accessible, actionable intelligence.
- IoT Forestry Monitoring Solutions provide continuous data from dendrometers to assess forest growth and forecast productivity trends.
- Weather Data and Extreme Weather Alerts supply site-specific forecasts and alerts to help managers anticipate and respond to drought, wind, or heavy rain events.
- Climate Change Models integrate future temperature and precipitation projections to guide long- term adaptation strategies.
- Fire Risk Assessment combines fire risk indices and detection alerts to support prevention and rapid response.
Together, these services enhance situational awareness and operational planning, enabling proactive and climate-resilient forest management.
Users and their needs
The primary users of the Climate Smart Forestry services are forest managers who need a unified digital tool to monitor and manage forest resources efficiently. These users face challenges in collecting consistent field data, accessing reliable climate and weather information, and translating satellite and IoT data into practical insights for decision-making.
Through the ForestHQ platform, they will gain automated near real-time data flows from IoT field sensors, weather and fire alerts, and integrated climate projections to guide operational planning, growth assessment, and risk management.
Ultimately, users need accessible, integrated, and affordable tools that simplify data collection, enhance transparency, and improve the ability to plan, act, and report within a changing climate context.
Service/ system concept
Climate Smart Forestry delivers a single, easy-to-use platform that turns many data sources into clear, actionable information. It gathers readings from IoT forest sensors (e.g., dendrometers and soil moisture probes), combines them with satellite images, and adds local weather, forecasts, and future climate scenarios. The system checks data quality, stores it securely, and presents it through dashboards, alerts, and simple tools.
Users can see live growth and soil conditions, assess short-term risks from wind, heat, or drought, receive fire-risk warnings, and explore “what-if” views based on climate projections. They can download reports or connect their own tools via application programming interfaces.
At a high level, data flows from sensors, satellites, and weather/climate sources into an ingestion and quality-control layer. From there, information is stored and made available in ForestHQ, where analytics and models power real-time alerts, maps, and forecasts for managers and field teams.
Space Added Value
Climate Smart Forestry builds on the capabilities of space-based assets to provide continuous, scalable, and objective information over forested areas. The service integrates Sentinel-2 optical imagery to monitor forest productivity through vegetation indices (e.g., NDVI), under different weather conditions.
In addition, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), provide precise positioning for IoT devices and field sensors, enabling accurate geolocation of measurements and alignment with satellite imagery.
The service also integrates OpenWeatherMap satellite-derived weather products and Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS) datasets, which provide reanalysis and forecast information on temperature, precipitation, and drought. For fire risk and active fire detection, it uses the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) and NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), both based on satellite thermal anomaly products (e.g., MODIS and VIIRS).
Current Status
Current status
The Climate Smart Forestry project has completed the BDR/CDR, finalising the system design, architecture, and detailed requirements for the integrated ForestHQ platform. User and stakeholder feedback has been consolidated through a series of technical workshops with Treemetrics.
Work has now advanced to software development of ForestHQ modules for data ingestion, analytics, and GUI interfaces. In parallel, the IoT network implementation is underway, with pilot installations of dendrometers, soil moisture sensors, and gateways in selected forest sites.
The upcoming phase will focus on system development, integration, testing, and data validation in preparation for the FAT milestone.
