Final Meeting Development of Harmonised Indicators and Estimation Procedures for Forests with Protective Functions against Natural Hazards in the Alpine Space Conclusions

Final Meeting ProAlp succeeded in: –developing harmonized indicators and estimation procedures for forests with protective functions against natural hazards. –modeling the hazard potential for avalanche and rockfall

Final Meeting ProAlp succeeded in: –including the damage potential into the derivation of forests with protective functions. –combining NFI and RS data for downscaling point information into total area –producing maps of the different system components and hazard types

Final Meeting Indicators and thresholds: –ProAlp only deals with forests with direct protective function, because forests with indirect protective function cannot be modeled spatially explicit –Indicators were restricted according to actual NFI and RS possibilities –Some of the thresholds have to be validated in the future

Final Meeting Cross boundary forest mapping: –Forest mapping in the Alpine Space is challenging –Huge impact of the quality of the Landsat scene –manual corrections are important after kNN classification –Different forest definitions are less important

Final Meeting Hazard Potential: –Low accuracy of digital terrain models makes it difficult to model the hazard potential –“simple” stochastic general gradient models were used for the potential process area of avalanche and rockfall –Nevertheless results are surprisingly good –Further validation on a local scale are still necessary

Final Meeting Damage Potential: –area estimation of forests with direct protective functions are highly sensible to the used infrastructure data. –Existing data on the international level are not suitable. –Concrete results of ProAlp concerning area estimation of protection forests only show the capability of the developed methods.

Final Meeting Protection forest – protective effect: –The estimation of the protective effect of forests is still open to scientific research. –Nevertheless the approaches in some alpine countries like the silvicultural guidelines in NAIS (Switzerland), ISDW (Austria) and GSM (France) are promising

Final Meeting Protection forest – protective effect: –Within ProAlp it was possible to harmonize these approaches –It was also possible to fit the indicators to the possibilities of remote sensing techniques for down-scaling procedures

Final Meeting Protection forest – protective effect: –The evaluate the results of the estimation of the protective effect is challenging –First comparisons of coarse and fine scale approach show differences of the results –Comparisons between the statistical and coarse scale mapping approach are promising

Final Meeting Thank You for your Attention