18 April 2016

The DIABOLO project: Forest Information for Bioeconomy Outlooks

CONFERENCE

The Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at University of Copenhagen will be hosting the DIABOLO conference on 19-20 April 2016. The DIABOLO project – Distributed, Integrated and Harmonised Forest Information for Bioeconomy Outlooks – has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and has a project duration of 1.3.2015–28.2.2019. The project is being coordinated by the Natural Resources Institute Finland.

The DIABOLO project focuses on forests and forest information. European forests are in high demand. Increasing interest for biomass, biodiversity and other ecosystem goods and services calls for changes in forest-related policies at different levels and across different sectors. To deliver high impact, beyond state-of-the-art work within the ecological and socio-economic diversity in Europe is needed. 

The transdisciplinary DIABOLO project involves experts in quantitative modelling, policy science and National Forest Inventories (NFI’s), from 25 European countries, committed to providing new methodologies and information for various end-uses, including FISE, GLOBIOM and FAO/UNECE. From Department of Geosciences and Naturel Resource Management, Thomas Nord-Larsen, Senior Researcher, Frank Søndergaard Jensen, Professor and Vivian Kvist Johannsen, Senior Researhcer are participating in the project.

The main aim of DIABOLO is to provide relevant, harmonised, comprehensive and reliable, up-to-date data and information. The project addresses this aim in the following ways:

Firstly – improvements in the methods of data collection, such as national forest inventories and monitoring systems, in order to produce more accurate, harmonised and timely information that can be fed into EU forest information systems, 

Secondly – consistent, up-to-date forest information to support the development of EU policies and international processes,

Thirdly – methodologies to make innovative use of data collected using terrestrial, aerial and space based platforms.

From a Danish perspective, our forests endure these challenges also, and whilst we work on multiple aspects of this, it is of great benefit to be part of this project. The conference is taking place one year after the project start, meaning many of the Work Package’s have started. It is hoped that these two days will further boost the progress within and between the WP’s.