Remote Sensing Based Forest Indicators in Support of Restoration Monitoring

The UN decade on Ecosystem Restoration has put the need for ecosystem monitoring high on the political agenda. The European Commission has reacted by putting forward a proposal for a European Nature Restoration Law, which is currently in consultation stage. This and other biodiversity targets heavily rely on indicators to measure the policies’ impacts and to allow for enforcement measures. Suitable indicators need to be accurate and meaningful, they should be costeffective and quickly accessible, transparent in their generation, and provide spatially explicit information – ideally all at once. One of the problems with most indicators is, that they are typically either not specific enough or not easy to generate because they require very specific data. Remote sensing (RS) is a way to provide indicators in a spatially explicit manner and over larger areas than field assessments. Here, we analyzed different forest related indicators (forest area, forest fragmentation, species distribution, canopy height and vertical structure) over time for the assessment of restoration progress in both forest areas and wetlands. We evaluated multitemporal assessments of forest restoration after severe disturbance (e.g. from bark beetle) and for bog restoration monitoring. We found that LiDAR is especially important for monitoring restoration success, i.e. for identifying areas of shrub and tree encroachment in a bog, where apparently the water table was not increased sufficiently or still had an unwanted drain. LiDAR can also be used to detect drainage infrastructure such as channels and dams