The impact of disturbances on the productivity and biomass of European forests

Forests account for most of the global terrestrial carbon sink.

Yet, they are exposed to an increasing stress from climate-induced disturbances (wild fires, droughts, storms, insect outbreaks) and land-use pressure (deforestation, intensive forestry, expansion of plantations ).

Due to the coarse resolution of the the past generation of satellites (MODIS, Landsat), the severity, extent and the timing of these disturbances are not accurately assessed across the European continent, which limits our understanding of forest resistance and recovery in the face of climate extremes, compound events and human-induced disturbances.

A new generation of satellite constellation (PlanetScope) providing very high resolution imagery at 3 meters resolution daily has been launched in 2016, and reached full capacity to map small scale disturbances down to tree level.

The PARDI (PARtial DIsturbances) project will take advantage of this unique dataset and make a giant leap to quantify and understand the impact of disturbances on the mortality, biomass, carbon loss and recovery of European forests.

PARDI will go beyond the state of the art by providing an unprecedented spatial resolution (from 30 m in the most recent literature to 3 m in this project), thus reducing the uncertainty on productivity and biomass changes.

The outcomes of PARDI will help to assess the sensitivity of European forests to climate change, and the vulnerability of key ecosystem services such as carbon sinks and wood production.