The scientific work entitled “Developing a site index model for P. Pinaster stands in NW Spain by combining bi-temporal ALS data and environmental data” presents a Site Index model for the species P. pinaster in Northwest Spain, combining airborne LiDAR bitemporal data belonging to the National Plan of Aerial Orthophotography (PNOA) for the periods 2009-2011 and 2015-2017, data from the datos del Fourth National Forest Inventory (IFN4, 2009) and Forestry Inventory of the Northwest Peninsula (IFNN, 2018) and various sources of environmental data (climatic, soil and physiographic).
The Site Index (SI) is a common measure of a site’s forest productivity, serving as a basis for forest management. Therefore, this work focused on generating Site Index models using free and open data sources, available for the Autonomous Community of Galicia. Among the most relevant aspects of this work, it is worth highlighting that the models are applicable at a regional scale to generate spatially explicit productivity maps at a very high resolution and level of detail.
This work has been published in the scientific journal Forest Ecology and Management, belonging to the category “Forestry” del Jounal Citation Reports (JCR):
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2020.118690
The research was led by Dr. Juan Guerra, researcher from 3edata and by Dr. Juan Gabriel Alvárez-González, Chair from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) within the Environmental and Sustainable Forestry Management Unit (UXAFORES), with the help of researchers from the Universities of León (ULE), Arizona State (ASU), and with the collaboration of the Forest Inventory Service (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food).
This work has been supported by the Torres Quevedo Programme (Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness) (PTQ2018-010043), VIS4FIRE project(RTA 2017-0042-C05-05), and the support of the Instituto Superior de Agronomía of Lisbon University and the Strategic Group BioReDes (ED431E 2018/09) funded by Xunta de Galicia.
